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.