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Paper short abstract

Co-produced with Qisetna, this paper presents two Syrian women’s recollections of the Euphrates River as forms of grassroots river knowledge that reimagine agency and kinship through thinking, living with river flow and that resist hydro-hegemonic modernisation in the twentieth century.

Paper long abstract

Co-produced with Qisetna, a Syrian-led cultural NGO rooted in civic storytelling, this paper brings together two sites of river-imagining: one drawn from local inhabitants—two women’s recollections of the Euphrates River in Al Mayādīn, a town in eastern Syria—and the other from contemporary environmental scholarship, particularly work on river ontologies and water justice movements. Situating both sites of knowledge within twentieth-century developments, including postwar nationalist state-building and large-scale dam construction in the Tigris–Euphrates basin, the paper presents them as sites of contestation that challenge centralised, technocratic governance regimes shaping modern socio-environmental relations. It argues that these sites of knowledge, in their mutual becoming, embody alternative modes of worldmaking grounded in diffuse agency across human and nonhuman actors and their daily interactions. Although vernacular river knowledge has been marginalised through hydro-hegemonic modernisation, bringing these recollections into emerging dialogues and movements of environmental ethics and justice allows the paper to present them not merely as testimonies but as living resources for eco-ethical futures.

Adopting an experimental approach to knowledge production, the paper follows recollections as guiding threads that shape its arguments rather than treating them as illustrative material. In doing so, it both demonstrates and enacts forms of resistance that emerge through dialogue as part of diverse processes of commoning, encompassing not only material practices and theoretical analysis but also memories and hopes amid loss and uncertainty.