Short Abstract

The panel explores how anthropology can be practiced with water—as a medium, collaborator, and method. Drawing on the blue humanities and hydrofeminism, it asks how watery, sensory, and care-based approaches can depolarize knowledge and reimagine ethnography in times of ecological crisis.

Long Abstract

In a world marked by political, ecological, and epistemic polarization, this panel explores how water can be more than a metaphor or an epistemological tool—how it can act as a medium, collaborator, and companion through which anthropology might be practiced differently. Drawing on the blue humanities, hydrofeminism, and more-than-human ethnography, we ask what it means to practice blue anthropology and how ethnography can be reimagined through watery, sensory, and more-than-human methodologies.

What experimental methods allow researchers to work, analyze, and tell stories (textual or otherwise) with water? How can hydrofeminist and hydrosocial approaches help to depolarize knowledge, relations, and experience? In what ways do watery practices—such as hydro-sounds listening, wading, floating, diving, or employing eco-technologies (Åsberg)—open up new forms of ethnographic attention, writing, and responsibility? What happens to anthropological ethics, knowledge, and authorship when we take water as both a medium and a collaborator in research?

By foregrounding water as an agentive, relational entity, the panel highlights the potential of blue anthropology to respond to climate and ecological crisis (including water scarcity, flooding, and contamination), along with related social tensions, political and economic entanglements, and inequalities, through care-based and situated practices. We invite contributions that explore the practical, experimental, analytical, and affective dimensions of doing anthropology with water—through immersion, sensory attunement, and alliances across species, materials, and disciplines.

The session will also serve as a networking platform for European blue anthropologists and will culminate in a post-session field trip exploring Poznań’s watery infrastructures and environments.

This Panel has 1 pending paper proposal.
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