- Convenors:
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Sara Asu Schroer
(University of Oxford)
Marketa Zandlova (Charles University in Prague)
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- Discussant:
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Franz Krause
(University of Cologne)
- Formats:
- Panel
Short Abstract
In recent decades, droughts have intensified, and water insecurities have spread, unevenly affecting people and landscapes around the globe. We invite papers exploring how droughts, as socio-material processes, emerge and come to matter in the lives of humans and wider ecological communities.
Long Abstract
In recent decades, droughts have intensified, and water insecurities have spread, unevenly affecting communities and landscapes across the globe. This panel invites contributions that explore how diverse people and communities understand, experience, enact, and respond to drought in increasingly drying landscapes. This includes attention to more-than-human lives in landscapes long dominated by projects of economic progress, materialising, for instance, in large-scale hydrological infrastructures, industrial agriculture, or monocultural plantations. The panel will consider droughts and the situated ways in which they emerge not merely as ‘natural’ phenomena, but as social and political matters of concern (Latour 2008), shaped by human-driven climate change and colonial histories of exploitation of both people and land.
How are people differently affected by droughts, and what are the political and social implications? How do droughts expose or exacerbate existing social and ecological fractures as well as historical injustices? In what ways are cultural, spiritual, or material practices reshaped by periods of prolonged dryness? How may we approach the materialities of drought through on-the-ground ethnographic research?
Gathering around such questions, we invite papers, from anthropology and beyond, that engage with the diverse contexts in which droughts emerge and come to matter in the lives of humans and the wider ecological communities of which they are part. We also welcome papers that address the limits and possibilities of cross-disciplinary dialogue with fields such as hydrology, climatology, and ecology, when considering how droughts, as socio-material processes, manifest and take shape across different spatial and temporal scales.