Short Abstract

Knowing aquatic ecosystems has usually been the purview of the fields that STS scholars study. How can STS produce knowledge about water with, but also independently from, our colleagues in the aquatic sciences? This session experiments with alternative methods for knowing and thinking with water.

Description

Our understandings of aquatic environments are dominated by technoscience. Take, for example, the terms used by the United Nations of Ocean Sciences for Sustainable Development (2021-2030), new trends in restoration and conservation attempting to address the growing challenges posed to water ecosystems by environmental crisis, or the development of new technologies that support extractive practices such as deep-sea mining or offshore wind-farming. It is no wonder that STS interest in aquatic ecosystems is flourishing.

While traditional methods in the social sciences, such as ethnography and interviews, have proven useful for aquatic enquiries thus far, they remain dependent on the goodwill of gatekeepers and unequal access to key sites like research stations and vessels. In STS, there is a growing interest in experimenting with methods that break that dependence through artistic, speculative and sensory approaches. In aquatic STS, such methods must overcome not only limited access to institutional knowledge practices, but also the materialities that separate humans from the submerged.

In this Making & Doing session, we invite participants to share with one another their strategies, practices and devices for exploring underwater worlds by addressing the question: how can we produce STS knowledge about water both in collaboration with, but also independently from, technoscientific communities like marine biologists, ecologists, or limnologists?

This session will offer initial insights into what knowing water could look like when engaging a diverse set of practices that can occur also beyond technoscientific institutions. Based on the conditions provided by the conference space, this session will be designed to give participants the opportunity to showcase their methodological strategies for overcoming aqueous empirical barriers. Engaging with multiple ways of knowing water will enrich our social scientific methodological tools and open new pathways for developing more resilient versions of the aquatic environments on which we depend.