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Paper short abstract

This paper examines composite curating as a transdisciplinary research methodology in the politically polarised Rhenish lignite mining area. It asks how research co-creation with water can hold conflicting knowledges in tension and foster response-ability beyond dominant post-mining futures.

Paper long abstract

The Rhenish lignite mining area in western Germany constitutes a politically charged and epistemically fragmented field, where extractivist infrastructures, climate activism, scientific expertise, bureaucratic governance, and local lifeworlds collide. At the centre of these conflicts are water bodies that trigger divergent visions of (deep-time) futures of (post-)mining landscapes. Water emerges as an underlying vital force structuring hydro-relational imaginaries of environmental transformation.

This paper introduces composite curating as a transdisciplinary methodology for knowledge co-creation. Developed at the intersection of anthropology (Hetherington 2025), curatorial studies (Bismarck 2021), posthuman feminism (Neimanis 2017), and artistic research, composite curating operates as a research intervention grounded in four methodological principles: relationality (foregrounding situated relations between human/more-than-human actors), constellation (assembling heterogeneous perspectives without resolving their tensions), translation (mediating between disciplinary, political, and affective registers), and transposition (creating ecotones of meaning across domains).

Empirically, the paper draws on the case study Walking with Water Ghosts, a collective walking-based intervention that brought together different stakeholders to engage with troubled waters in the mining region. Addressing these “water ghosts” through artistic and participatory activations on site aimed to negotiate conflicting enactments of water and to open affective and epistemic spaces beyond entrenched positions.

The paper discusses the potentials and pitfalls of composite curating as a methodological approach that enables anthropological research to inhabit interstitial spaces where different knowledges can be held in tension. It asks whether co-creating with water on site—taking seriously its transtemporal and transspatial circulations—offers methodological cues for generating new forms of response-ability.