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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”.