- Convenors:
-
Małgorzata Owczarska
(Warsaw)
Agata Stanisz (Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań)
Send message to Convenors
- Formats:
- Panel
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.
Accepted papers
Session 1Paper short abstract
My paper explores the relation of static and fluid knowledge practices in the case of corroding dumped munitions in the North Sea. Through immersion in water, I show the intersections of saltwater, toxicity and scientific endeavours, asking how anthropology can contribute to this ecological issue.
Paper long abstract
Saltwater pushes us to look closely at the dumped munitions in the North Sea. Up to 1.3 million tonnes of munitions were dumped there after WWII. Now, 80 years later, this is particularly apparent as an ecological slow disaster (Knowles 2020), as the saltwater is causing the metal shells to corrode and releasing toxic elements into the water. TNT, the most common explosive, does not dissolve in water but forms metabolites that are as toxic as the original substance. Scientific endeavours, particularly in the natural sciences, tend to examine this toxic legacy of war rather statically. Although they adapt their work to the sea's conditions, their standardised scientific results erase the sea's fluid characteristics.
In my paper, I explore the relationship between static and fluid knowledge practices, drawing on my ethnographic work in the interdisciplinary research project REMARCO. I consider diving as a sensory and immersive approach to researching fluid toxicities, which simultaneously relies on technical mediations, materiality, and funding. As an anthropologist, gaining a scientific diving licence is difficult as these are mainly aimed at natural scientists. Further, the North Sea is a challenging diving location: it is cold and turbid, and divers rely on dry suits and technical equipment for sampling and taking underwater videos. Through immersion in water, I illustrate how anthropological, STS and multispecies perspectives can contribute to this ecological issue, which is dominated by economic and political interests. Moreover, the intersection of saltwater, toxicity, immersion and scientific endeavours raises questions of responsibility.
Paper short abstract
Treating the Adriatic Sea as a medium and collaborator, blue anthropology is positioned at the intersection of spearfishers’ sensory knowledge and skilled labour practices, marine science, and embodied underwater ethnography, revealing how climate change is experienced, forecasted, and negotiated.
Paper long abstract
The waters of the relatively small Adriatic Sea reflect a myriad of condensed Anthropocene transformations—rising temperatures, salinity shifts, coastal erosion, intensified tourism, overfishing, the arrival of new species, and changing fishing practices. As a marginal Mediterranean sea with constrained circulation, the Adriatic absorbs and redistributes environmental change, mediating cultural meanings and reconfiguring human–marine relations in the region and beyond. This paper presents Croatian breath-holding spearfishers’ and the ethnographer’s body-transformation practices required to immerse into Adriatic depths—whether for fishing or to bear witness to change through participant observation—asking what the changing sea demands of human visitors and examining pressures on lungs, labour, and livelihoods. Drawing on underwater and coastal ethnography, blue anthropology is positioned between the sensory, embodied ecological knowledge of Croatian spearfishers and the formalized observations of marine scientists, treating the Adriatic as both medium and collaborator. These epistemological juxtapositions reveal not only what remains unknown about the Adriatic’s transformation, but also how climate uncertainty is felt, argued over, and lived, foregrounding the ethical stakes of environmental and cultural knowledge production and showing why anthropology matters for understanding how climate change intersects with care, precarity, and uneven exposure.
Paper short abstract
This ethnography of Lianjia boat dwellers in Fujian proposes ‘doing anthropology with water’, taking water as an interlocutor. It examines how intimate engagement with water shapes homeworlds and how government-led resettlement to shore reconfigures bodily experience and social relations.
Paper long abstract
Based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork among the Lianjia boat dwellers in northeast Fujian, southeast China, this research proposes a methodological and analytical approach that takes water as an interlocutor in understanding processes of dwelling and displacement. Rather than treating water merely as a backdrop to human activity or a resource to be managed, it argues for ‘doing anthropology with water’, attending to the material properties, sensories, rhythms and intimacies of aquatic life as generative of both social relations and anthropological insight.
Through detailed analysis of wooden boat materiality and sensory experience, this research develops the concept of ‘intimacy with water’. By tracing how boat dwellers maintain, navigate and dwell within the fluid materiality of boats and waterways, it demonstrates how water’s properties (its permeability, responsiveness to weather and tide, its capacity to hold and carry) become sedimented into bodily knowledge, spatial practices and networks of social relations.
For communities whose homeworlds have been shaped over generations through intimate engagement with water, the recent government-led transition to shore-based housing represents more than a change of address. It entailed a reconfiguration of sensory experience, relational practices and ontological orientations. This research further explores the entanglement of water with the flow of people coming ashore, examining how their watery bodies continue to be attuned within the renewed homeworld suspended between water and shore.
Paper short abstract
Rooted in ethnographic fieldwork and a multispecies ethnography approach of human-fish relationships in Canada, this paper explores the practical and conceptual challenges and potentials of working on, in and with water and asks how such an engagement can go beyond superficial dimensions.
Paper long abstract
Learning with and through water is an everyday practice for more-than-human life in watery environments. This paper asks how anthropologists can actively immerse themselves in these more-than-human worlds and how such a methodological approach can reshape understandings of these life-worlds and beyond. Based on an ethnographic research project on human-fish relationships on the Canadian West Coast, this paper explores the process of learning to understand and work with water in collaboration with human and non-human actors. Here, sailing, diving and wading are explored as ways to immerse in watery life-worlds. In coastal British Columbia knowing the waters, their currents, tide timings and wave heights is essential for more-than-human survival. At the same time, the fluidity of water defies borders – of nation states and Indigenous territories – which problematizes national approaches to marine management. This fluidity also challenges the idea of beings as separate entities and instead underlines their interconnectedness. Environmental DNA testing reveals how beings become a part of the waters. When DNA is used as a synonym for identity, eDNA testing can provoke local discussions of what belongs and what does not (for example when farmed Atlantic salmon becomes part of the eDNA of Pacific waters). Starting from the practical implications of doing ethnography on, in and with water, this paper will explore the conceptual shift these practices provoke as watery worlds emphasize the interconnectedness of life in a special way.
Paper short abstract
This paper proposes a blue medical anthropology that reframes water in flooding context in Indonesia as a relational force shaping early-life health, care practices, and biological vulnerability.
Paper long abstract
In flood-prone regions of Indonesia, water is more than an environmental condition; it is a relational force that reorganize early-life health, care practices, and biological vulnerability. However, water often remains treated as background infrastructure rather than as an active force in medical and anthropological research. Therefore, in this paper, I propose a conceptual and methodological framework for practicing a blue medical anthropology that treats flooding and water exposure as active collaborators in shaping early-life vulnerability, care practices, and biological risk.
Drawing on public health, humanitarian, child health, nutrition, and governmental literature on flooding in Indonesia, alongside my training in medical and biological anthropology. I examine how flooding reorganizes caregiving routines, food access, sanitation, and maternal well-being during critical developmental periods. Floodwater mediates exposures to pathogens, disrupts nourishment, intensifies stress, and reshapes everyday practices of care, making early life a sensitive site for understanding hydrosocial vulnerability.
Conceptually, this paper brings insights from blue humanities and hydrofeminism into dialogue with medical anthropology by foregrounding the infant body as porous, environmentally embedded, and shaped through relations with water. Methodologically, I argue for integrating biological attention to nutrition, growth, and infection with watery ethnographic approaches attentive to seasonality, immersion, and sensory exposure. I outline prospective research strategies that combine caregiver narratives, observations of water use, and biological indicators of early-life stress and health.
By centering infants and caregivers in flood-prone context, I suggest that practicing anthropology with water enables care-based, depolarized approaches to climate vulnerability that bridge ecological crisis, biological embodiment, and everyday life.
Paper short abstract
This paper presents the methodological proposition Flooding Fields, reflecting on how flood destabilize landscapes, hydro-social relations, and the research field itself. Drawing on feminist, sensory, and artistic practices, it explores what it means to do anthropology when the field is “flooding.”
Paper long abstract
The paper presents an in-process methodological proposition emerging from a research project provisionally titled Flooding Fields. Rather than approaching flood “solely” as a catastrophic event of the climate crisis, it proposes to think-with-flood as an assemblage that unsettles boundaries, critiques extractivist and technopolitical dynamics, and reconfigures relations among humans, non-human beings, infrastructures, waters, and lands.
Drawing on previous work in multimodal ethnography, artistic research, and water-based research-creation, the paper treats flood as an emerging hydro-social condition that destabilizes not only human–non-human landscapes but also the very idea of the research field. Flooding calls for new ways of knowing and doing that are relational, sensory, feminist, experimental, and in-motion.
The paper introduces fields through a deliberate double meaning. On the one hand, it refers to material terrains —rivers, plains, infrastructures, agricultural zones— shaped by water–land entanglements. On the other, it designates fields of inquiry where ethnography, feminist and artistic practice, and theory interweave. Through methodologies and technologies such as walking, listening, sound recording, and media-based research-creation tools, flood is approached as a prolonged state of hydro-social transition, where water continues to rework land, memory, materialities, and life.
Situated in relation to future research in flood-affected Thessaly, Greece, following Storm Daniel (2023), the paper asks what forms of attentiveness, response-ability, and care are required when research engages with unstable socio-ecological conditions. It offers a sensory, affective, and practice-based reflection on what it means to do anthropology when the field itself is “flooding”.
Paper short abstract
My research explores the complex interactions of women and water, as an active co-presence in their daily life, in the socio-geographic context of the Romanian Danube Delta, between the Black Sea and the wetlands. My longtime ethnography is shaped by emotional presence, care and accountability.
Paper long abstract
My long-term ethnography in the Romanian Danube Delta - this messy network of ponds and marshes shaping the lives and livelihoods of local communities - explores women’s day-to-day and narrative engagements with water, over their lifespans: playful waters, working waters and contemplative waters. Water shapes and sustains gendered practices of care, memory, loss, and survival. It mediates connections between humans, and between humans and nonhumans, while configuring identity, belonging, and recollection. Local women dwell on various waters: Danube as a historical stream, the Black Sea as a place of enjoyment, risk, and grief, and the wetlands as spaces of labor, livelihood, and ecological intimacy. Despite hardships and personal losses to river and sea, water remains central to women’s livelihoods, emotional worlds, and sense of belonging. These waters are simultaneously nurturing and threatening, connecting communities to global routes of tourism while producing seasonal seclusion and precarity.
Drawing on hydro-feminist anthropology, particularly receptive to ecological precarity, gendered inequalities, and climate uncertainty, my work foregrounds women’s embodied, emotional, and synesthetic engagements with water as forms of situated knowledge. Ethnographic methods (participant observation, co-exploration, dialogs, and recurrent engagement with local women) are sustained by emotional attendance and over time immersion, transforming research practices into acts of care and accountability. Water as research collaborator destabilizes anthropocentric frameworks and deliberately unsettles orthodox authority in ethnography; where flows, tides, and seasonal rhythms shape social, cultural, and ecological life, gendered knowledge is interactive, contingent, and emotional, bridging together an environment polarized by divergent interests and various tensions.
Paper short abstract
This paper explores how anthropology can be practiced with water through ethnography by listening to the Bharalu river in India. Treating Bharalu as a collaborator, it examines sensory and relational engagements with a polluted fluvial environment shaped by development, neglect, and contested care.
Paper long abstract
The Bharalu (Bahini) River in Guwahati, Northeast India was once an active waterway embedded in everyday life. It now extends through the city as a polluted drain shaped by growth-centric development. Situated within emerging debates in blue ecologies, this paper explores how anthropology can be practiced with fluvial environments by engaging the Bharalu as a collaborator. Rather than treating rivers merely as resources or infrastructures, the paper approaches the Bharalu as a relational entity shaping culture, memory and social life. Drawing on multimodal field engagement including walking alongside the river, observing everyday encounters, listening to its sounds, documentary filming, interviews, and household surveys, the paper examines human-riverine relations. Smell, stagnation, urban flooding and practices of avoidance emerge as ethnographic cues through which residents, bureaucrats and activists negotiate care, indifference and responsibility. In this sense, the river becomes constitutive of the ethnographic process itself, structuring what can be sensed, remembered, and narrated, directing attention toward fractured hydrosocial relations rather than abstract sustainability frameworks. Engaging insights from the blue humanities, critical spatial theory and political ecology, the paper analyses historically embedded community relationships with the river, wetland stewardship and ecological restraint rooted in local memory. By bringing these lived experiences into dialogue with contemporary water management, the paper points toward hybrid approaches in which the Bharalu actively participates as a socio-ecological commons rather than a waste-space, shaping blue anthropology and its possibilities in a polarised world marked by contested ecologies, neglect and care.