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- Convenors:
-
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.
Accepted papers
Session 1Paper short abstract
In this paper, I analyze how drought in the Caatinga biome acts as a creative force. Through ethnography with vaqueiros, I explore how multispecies genealogies – ancient trees and waterbeds – embody memories of labor, slavery, and resistance, uncovering a tension between scarcity and abundance.
Paper long abstract
Based on my long-term fieldwork with the vaqueiros of Pernambuco, in the Brazilian semi-arid region (sertão), I argue that the severity of the droughts does not simply erase history; rather, it fixes social memory onto the material landscape. Challenging the conventional framing of drought as a mere environmental lack, I propose instead to analyze drought as a creative force. In this "drying world," as proposed by the panel, I intend to analyze how social memories are etched into the landscape of the Caatinga biome, and how particular places create historical narratives – ranging from the labor of vaqueiros to the sagas of rural banditry, migration, and the legacies of slavery. I argue that these narratives are embodied into environmental traces of aridity ("veredas"), which include water sources and ancient trees. I focus particularly on the umbuzeiro, a native tree recognized as a symbol of drought resistance, but which I describe as a living archive, often carrying the names and personalities of ancestors. How does the Caatinga landscape share collective memories through multispecies genealogies? Notions of multispecies genealogies and mnemonic landscapes can uncover a tension between the official record of scarcity and the abundance that people and other beings carry with them, highlighting deep-seated polarizations of land, race, and power. By living with trees and waterbeds that keep the names and memories of families, the inhabitants of the sertão articulate an ecology of relations that contributes to environmental anthropology debates regarding social and ecological memory, kinship, landscape, and materiality.
Paper short abstract
The year 2022 was marked not only by an escalated war against Ukraine but also by a prolonged drought. Offering insights into smallholders' coping with the coinciding effects of drought, war and a general decline in pastoralism, this paper discusses more-than-human care amid multiple crises.
Paper long abstract
Cows and other grazing animals have long shaped the landscape of the Ukrainian Carpathians. Most of them have been kept by smallholders who organized the care for their animals in collective herding systems. In recent years, however, herds and herding systems have largely disappeared from the landscape. Finding themselves in times of multiple crises, smallholders who continue to keep a cow must manage on their own. In addition to the uncertainties caused by the outbreak of the full-scale war against Ukraine, the Europe-wide drought in the summer of the same year led to a 90 per cent loss of hay harvests for some farmers. This loss coincided with military mobilisation, a devaluation of the national currency, and an absence of government aid. As hay, an essential “matter of care” (Bellacasa 2017) and crucial metabolic link between households and landscape, became a scarce resource, many farmers had to sell or slaughter their cattle. Others, who kept their cows, substituted hay by foraging topinambur (Jerusalem artichoke), a potentially invasive neophyte that thrives in disturbed ecosystems, on roadsides and riverbanks. To feed their cows, smallholders thus engaged in a new metabolic connection with a landscape that the very loss of herding practices had produced. Offering insights into smallholders’ coping with the coinciding effects of the 2022 drought, the war and a general decline in pastoralism, this paper examines adaptive and tinkering (Mol et al. 2010) aspects of more-than-human care amid multiple crises.
Paper short abstract
Based on an ethnography conducted with farmers, primatologists, and capuchin monkeys in a desertification hotspot in Northeastern Brazil, this presentation examines how drought, social inequalities, and multispecies relations are continuously reinvented, reflecting on conservation and science.
Paper long abstract
Northeastern Brazil has long occupied the country’s collective imaginary, frequently characterized by drought and poverty. Six municipalities in this region are classified as desertification hotspots, one of them being Gilbués, in the state of Piauí. In this context, migration from rural to urban centers has intensified among local small-scale farmers. However, the Oliveira family, who live on their own land, have, at least for now, managed to remain there.
One key reason for this persistence is the family’s involvement in scientific research on capuchin monkeys (Sapajus libidinosus), identified as stone tool users capable of cracking hard-shelled nuts. This discovery attracted primatologists, inaugurating a research project that has lasted for more than two decades. Members of the Oliveira family have worked closely on the project, and a few years ago one of them proposed a study comparing the availability of palm nuts over time, based on his observation that nuts cracked by the monkeys were becoming scarcer due to rising temperatures and drought. This assessment was later corroborated by scientific research, reinforcing primatologists’ argument that although the species itself is not threatened with extinction, the monkeys’ tool-use culture is at risk.
Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted with the Oliveira family, primatologists, and capuchin monkeys, this presentation examines how drought, social inequalities, and multispecies relations are continually reinvented. As pressure from large-scale agribusiness intensifies and climate change exacerbates heat and drought, it also reflects on what “conservation” and “science” can mean in this context.
Paper short abstract
This paper presents a multispecies visual ethnography of a British Columbia park affected by drought. As drought is often experienced as absence, I seek to render it perceptible as an embodied, multispecies phenomenon by attending to shared sensoriality.
Paper long abstract
This paper presents a multispecies visual ethnography of a British Columbia park affected by drought. I will use the case study of Woodhaven Park to make a methodological proposal on how drought can be made perceptible through an attention to the senses. Located on the unceded territory of the Syilx Okanagan Nation, Woodhaven Park was historically part of low-elevation wetlands and riparian forest shaped by seasonal water flows. Settler drainage, urban expansion, and agricultural development redirected groundwater and desiccated these wetlands, transforming the site into suburban parkland. Drought is most often experienced as absence, and its effects - on the park’s multispecies inhabitants, on the Syilx community whose ontology centres on water, and on the park’s human neighbours - can be difficult to perceive and represent. In response, the paper firstly argues that audio-visual ethnography can render drought perceptible as an embodied phenomenon, paying attention to heat, dryness, bodily fatigue, and altered soundscapes. Secondly, I propose that a sensory ethnographic approach opens a methodological pathway toward multispecies representation by attending to shared corporeality and environmental conditions across human and more-than-human lives, as illustrated through a short audio-visual excerpt.
Audio-visual excerpt: from min. 0 - 1:30
https://vimeo.com/1114348234/0c55971d17?share=copy&fl=sv&fe=ci
Paper short abstract
I will examine a hydroengineering project designed to restore water to a tourist region affected by drought. Despite it being presented as pro-environmental and pro-social, I argue that environmental protection and the 'sustainable growth' of tourism are incompatible.
Paper long abstract
This presentation aims to present a case study of a project to restore water resources in the Lakeland in central Poland, where I conducted field research into the social knowledge of ecosystems and nature conservation. Although it could be argued that the area has always been dry, it has experienced disturbances to the water regime for decades, caused by climate change and mining. The lakes in the area are protected under the Habitats Directive, yet they are drying up noticeably, impacting both the ecosystem and the tourism industry that has developed in the region. In view of these changes, measures to counteract the drying up of the lakes have been proposed for years. Recently, an agreement was reached between the local authorities, the mine (legally obliged to recultivate the land after closing down) and the State Forests to apply for funding for a hydroengineering project to 'save the lakes'. Although this project is presented as having ambitious pro-environmental and pro-social goals, its main objective is in fact to enable the continuation and growth of tourism (and potentially business) in the region. While the project is supported by many natural scientists and conservationists, I argue that it is impossible to reconcile the protection of valuable natural habitats with the continuation and expansion of tourist activities and infrastructure in accordance with the logic of sustainable development. In order to adapt to increasing drought, we need an alternative to the current market-liberal order that determines the actions of local governments and stakeholders.
Paper short abstract
This paper approaches kere—recurrent drought and famine in southern Madagascar—not as episodic crisis but as a chronic condition shaped by environmental variability, historical marginalisation, and political neglect, and outlines an ethnographic agenda for studying life in a drying world.
Paper long abstract
In southern Madagascar, prolonged drought and recurrent famine—locally referred to as kere—have long shaped livelihoods, social relations, and relations between humans and their environments. While policy and humanitarian discourses often frame kere as an episodic crisis or climate shock, it is more accurately understood as a chronic condition produced through the intersection of environmental variability, historical marginalisation, and political neglect.
Drawing on long-term ethnographic research on the island of Madagascar, as well as a critical engagement with anthropological, historical, and interdisciplinary literatures on famine, vulnerability, climate change, and development, this paper offers a programmatic exploration of drought as a socio-material process in southern Madagascar. It proposes an ethnographic approach to drought that foregrounds lived temporalities of waiting and endurance; moral debates around responsibility, aid, and deservingness; and the entanglement of human and more-than-human lives in drying landscapes.
Rather than treating drought as a naturalised environmental stressor, the paper argues for analysing kere as a matter of concern that reveals deeper social, ecological, and political fractures rooted in colonial histories and contemporary governance failures. By outlining key analytical questions and methodological orientations, the paper contributes to broader anthropological debates on drought, climate change, and life in a drying world, while laying the groundwork for future ethnographic research in southern Madagascar.
Paper short abstract
Based on ethnographic research in Romania’s Bărăgan Plain, this paper shows how drought operates through the breakdown of irrigation systems. Conservation farming emerges as a partial substitute for lost infrastructure, transforming historical neglect into individualised responsibility.
Paper long abstract
This paper approaches drought as both an infrastructural and a climatic condition. Drawing on ethnographic research conducted among industrial farms and smallholders in Romania’s Bărăgan Plain, it argues that contemporary drought is inseparable from the dismantling of socialist irrigation systems and the uneven redistribution of land and responsibility following decollectivisation. Farmers experience drought through soil moisture loss, crop stress, and pest proliferation, as well as through the absence of functioning canals, pumps, and collective maintenance regimes that once buffered climatic variability. In response, farms make efforts to turn to conservation agriculture/no-till methods as partial substitutes for lost irrigation systems. These shifts, however, require capital-intensive machinery, chemical inputs, and new forms of farming knowledge, deepening inequalities between farms that can afford such investments and those that cannot. I show how drought transforms infrastructural neglect into individualised technical problems, reframing historically produced vulnerabilities as matters of farm-level competence. By tracing drought across soils, machines, and failing irrigation systems, the paper shows how climate change unfolds through infrastructural breakdown, reshaping agrarian futures while obscuring the political decisions that produced uneven vulnerability.
Paper short abstract
In the Spreewald’s transforming hydrosocial territory, water crisis meets local agency through minor infrastructures. This paper examines how hand-operated water sluices enable residents to engage materially with drought, contrasting technocratic solutions with embodied practices of water management
Paper long abstract
Water crises and planetary heating are reshaping hydrosocial territories, producing critical junctures that demand renewed attention to how diverse expertise collectively navigates transformation. Following the saying “gewässerreich aber wasserarm” (rich in waterways but poor in water), Berlin-Brandenburg is one of Germany’s driest regions. In the Spreewald region (forest of the Spree), social life, cultural practices, and economic structures are built within an anthropogenic water network. However, the coal mining phase-out reduces the Spree River’s current, and rising temperatures accelerate evaporation, prompting residents’ anxieties about the future of their waterscape. A prolonged dry period between 2018 and 2023 intensified discourses of “losing water.” Increasing scarcity produces friction, uncertainty, and conflicts between everyday water relations and modern water abstraction.
Regional plans often follow an engineering approach, proposing large-scale infrastructural solutions: water transfers from other water bodies and post-mining lakes as water storage. However, residents are growing increasingly skeptical about such large-scale infrastructural thinking. I see minor infrastructure as a new entry point for conversations about addressing water issues at the level of everyday interaction. The Spreewald’s manually operated water sluices function as socio-technical devices that enable learning about human-water relations while bringing global discourses about water scarcity “down to earth.” While regional authorities debate complex engineering solutions, residents meet water scarcity through immediate, sensory encounters, asserting local agency within their changing hydrosocial network.
Paper short abstract
Drought and climate crisis are often framed as a matter of the future. We argue that studying shifting climatic regimes exposes the continuity in the hydro-geographies of white-minority regimes, and how natural and man-made infrastructures function within this in contemporary South Africa
Paper long abstract
The climate crisis, and specifically its hydrological manifestations, are often framed as a matter of the future, as tracking intensifying, albeit nonlinear, drought becomes a dominant analytic. This paper argues, drawing on ethnographic research across South Africa, that studying shifting climatic regimes exposes the invisibilised hydro-geographies of white-minority regimes and how natural and man-made infrastructures function within them. We analyse this as a case of ‘environing infrastructure’ (Rippa), thus drawing attention to the role of infrastructure in creating environments as enclosures.
Water insecurity and inequality have long been folded into the dominant historiography of colonial dispossession in South Africa, as forced and later legalised removals enabled white settlers to reside on riverbanks and productive water courses, giving rise to white-owned agricultural production. The geographies and unevenness of waterscapes that were visceral during the colonial period and through the apartheid era, however, shifted with the democratic regime in 1994. The post-apartheid state, charged by the National Water Act of 1998, sought to undo histories of hydrological dispossession, chiefly by developing the national water grid to spaces historically unserved. This shift, while lauded, depoliticised the uneven hydro-geographies nationally, and deterritorialised water through its infrastructuralisation.
The paper teases out how anthropological particularity can speak to a situated politics in facing water insecurity and inequality and highlights how a scalar and temporal lens offers an opportunity to reframe historical, current, and future hydro-infrastructures within climate change and increasingly drying landscapes.
Paper short abstract
This paper approaches drought as a hydrosocial process, arguing that low-water conditions are co-produced through infrastructures, water uses, and political arrangements rather than just climatic extremes, drawing on research in Grenoble, a city in the Alps long associated with water abundance.
Paper long abstract
This paper approaches drought as a hydrosocial process, arguing that low-water conditions are co-produced through infrastructures, water uses, and political arrangements rather than arising solely from climatic extremes. It draws on historical and ethnographic research in the hinterlands of Grenoble, a city in the French Alps long associated with water abundance.
The region has been deeply marked by hydraulic ingenuity and experimentation from at least the Middle Ages, that led to the development of hydroelectricity in the 19th century and the second industrial revolution it powered. Since the late nineteenth century, Grenoble’s drinking water supply has relied on wells tapping the alluvial aquifers of the Drac valley. From the outset, this public service coexisted with—and was progressively constrained by—industrial water uses linked to paper mills, chemical plants and hydroelectric development. Over time, the River Drac, its water table and its tributaries have been so heavily developed that they have been managed as simple “reserved flows”, negotiated with EDF, the French operator responsible of the dams, canals and hydroelectric plants . Attending to situated practices, discourses, and materialities through which low water is sensed and governed, the paper shows how drought emerges as a socio-material process shaped by infrastructures, imaginaries of abundance, and unequal water uses.
Paper short abstract
Southern Chile, currently imagined as a climate refuge due to its abundant water resources, paradoxically faces historic water shortages exacerbated by a mega-drought. I explore how water and infrastructure are reshaping local politics and territorial disputes among old and new social actors.
Paper long abstract
Southern Chile has historically been imagined as a land of abundant water and a potential climate refuge, attracting migrants from the country's semi-arid regions who settle in rural areas, often in irregular conditions and in the absence of state presence. However, the daily experience of the inhabitants reveals a paradox: despite the apparent abundance, there is a persistent historical shortage of water for human use. Since 2010, the mega-drought affecting Chile has intensified this contradiction, accelerating the trend toward a drier climate. The centrality of water to life and its depletion, together with infrastructural difficulties in accessing it, have forced unexpected alliances between old and new inhabitants, locals and outsiders, rich and poor, indigenous and non-indigenous. In these encounters, the organization of space is disputed and local political life is reconfigured. This paper situates itself at the intersection of water-infrastructure-humans, addressing the tensions between the presence and absence of water in a climate change context that paradoxically enhances the area as a refuge. Through ethnography that included interviews, observation of organizational instances, and walks along water flows and infrastructure networks, I address the role of water as a matter and of infrastructure in local politics. I ask how different actors imagine the presence and absence of water, and what effects these imaginations have on the dynamics of territorial organization and patterns of inclusion/exclusion from water supply.
Paper short abstract
Focusing on historical and anthropological research on the Simeto river in Eastern Sicily, this paper explores how water scarcity in Mediterranean wet landscapes emerges from both climate change and colonial histories of "improvement".
Paper long abstract
The Simeto river valley, in Eastern Sicily, epitomizes the socioecological crisis affecting Mediterranean wet landscapes. Since the beginning of the 20th century, state-led processes of modernization have turned the river into infrastructure, extracting, channeling, and piping water for irrigation and hydropower. Nowadays, with the intensifying climate crisis, water rarely reaches the sea, leaving landscapes parched and communities struggling with both water scarcity and flash floods. As a local herder told me, "The Simeto is a river where sometimes there's water and sometimes there isn't"—a statement that captures climate-induced rapid change and uncertainty.
Based on historical and ethnographic research conducted since 2023, this paper explores how small-scale farmers deal with such uncertainty and respond to drought by implementing adaptive practices that are marginal to and challenge large-scale programs of water management. Where agroindustry treats drought as a problem requiring large-scale technical solutions, these farmers engage it as "matter of concern" (Latour 2008) by implementing practices of care towards the environment as a totality.
By illustrating different examples, this paper reveals how drought emerges not merely from climate change but from colonial histories of "improvement" that privatized water and imposed extractive infrastructures. The contrast between hegemonic and marginal forms of water management illuminates different dwelling possibilities: the former preventing socioecological relationships from unfolding, the latter cultivating correspondence between human and more-than-human worlds. I argue that attending to marginal practices reveals alternative pathways for living with—rather than against—increasingly dry and uncertain times.
Paper short abstract
Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in the drought-stricken region of Catalonia, Spain, this contribution explores how frequent droughts remediate gendered forms of reproductive labor and public contestation.
Paper long abstract
The region of Catalunya (Spain) suffered a period of severe drought between 2022 and 2024, during which existing social inequalities concerning water use and rights surfaced, while new ones emerged, in both rural and urban areas. Focussing on this region, this contribution examines diverse state, community, and private responses to these droughts. Specifically, it draws on feminist scholarship to theorize two core components of these responses that cross various scales, ranging from private ‘adaptation’ to public organization. First, it examines the way droughts (re)mediated reproductive labour and care work in households, specifically as it pertained to practices of washing, cleaning, and cooking. Second, it examines how this intense period of drought led to renewed forms of mobilization and organization, and examines how such initiatives variously centre or gloss over the gendered dimensions in access and use of water in everyday life. Drawing these insights together, this contribution examines the potential of hydrofeminist perspectives for the anthropological study of gender and water as developed within the environmental humanities (Neimanis 2017) to think solidarities across bodies, spaces (nominally public and private), and scales.
Given Catalonia's traditionally politicised and organised society, this article proposes applying a hydrofeminist perspective to understand how this situation has affected and reshaped reproductive labour and care, for both humans and non-humans, by taking a close look at the controversies and politics of water when this is experienced as a contested issue.