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- Convenors:
-
Heta Tarkkala
(University of Helsinki)
Kari Lancaster (University of Bath)
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- Format:
- Traditional Open Panel
Short Abstract
Water is a substance of knowledge-making, constituting what can be known of our unstable world and relations between technology, science, environments, and society. This panel takes water as a site to rethink our planetary condition in relation to health, climate, environment, and security.
Description
Water is both “simply water” and always plural and multiple (Rusca et al., 2025; Barnes and Alatout, 2012). Within STS, attention has been paid for example to the sociotechnical assemblages water is part of (Barnes and Alatout, 2012). Equally, power relations, infrastructures and access to waters have gained attention of social scientists (Linton, 2010). But, water that is able to flow, carry, permeate, dissolve, drip and leak is also a substance of knowledge-making. Be it molecules, fungi, algae, microbes, fish, chemical compounds, toxic pollutants or oceanic temperatures, through technoscientific practices of sampling, measurement, prediction, monitoring and control, water is one means to study our damaged planet, standing in for a myriad of environmental, political, and social concerns. More than merely aqueous solution to carry other matter(s), watery encounters help constitute what can be known of our ever-changing unstable world, and are productive of relations between technology, science, environments, and society.
We invite presentations that take water as a site from which to rethink our planetary condition including in relation to public health, climate change, environmental destruction, natural disasters, security, infrastructures, resource management, toxicity, pollution and extraction. Across a range of fluid, leaky, gurgling, dissolving, brackish, and porous empirical sites and cases – from raindrops and melted glaciers to rivers and lakes, urban infrastructures and wastewater sewage systems – we invite contributions that ask what experiments and provocations begin to flow when we seek to encounter water as a turbulent site of contested knowledge production and decision making, thus extending STS engagements with water as an object of critical social scientific inquiry.