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This paper explores the the diverse ways that cultivators in rural central India imagine, engage with, and care for groundwater in ways that unsettle the boundaries between 'science', 'tradition', and 'superstition'.

Paper long abstract

This paper explores the imaginaries and practices of agriculturalists in rural India as they navigate the complex materiality of subsurface hard rock aquifers. For cultivators in semi-arid regions, irrigation is a matter of grave concern. Access to warer opening up novel agricultural possibilities - new crops, multiple crop cycles, and greater profits. Yet, knowledge of the subsurface is elusive and uncertain, leading farmers to call on spirits, gods, astrologers, and hydrogeologists in their quest. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in the Malwa region of central India, this paper attends to the diverse ways that cultivators imagine, engage with, and care for groundwater, and in doing so, unsettle the boundaries between 'science', 'tradition', and 'superstition'. Building on the panel's central premise that all modes of knowing groundwater entail some degree of speculation, I explore the tensions and convergences between these scientific and extra-scientific methods. Further, I examine how farmers from oppressed castes do not simply speculate on, but also speculate with, groundwater. While surface access to land reflects long-standing structural inequalities, subterranean uncertainties can potentially unsettle them, opening up novel possibilities for the emergence of anti-caste ecological imaginaries and practices. Bringing debates in STS into conversation with scholarship in the environmental humanities and critical caste studies, this presentation considers the theoretical and political possibilities opened up by speculative engagements with groundwater.

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Urban waters in Ho Chi Minh City rarely stay within neat boundaries. Following groundwater, I show how partial traces and institutional cuts shape what becomes knowable and actionable, and use salvage speculation to ask whose knowledge and labour are drawn in, transformed, and given authority.

Paper long abstract

Groundwater rarely appears as a bounded object of urban governance. In Ho Chi Minh City, it becomes perceptible through leakages, damaged infrastructures, pumping records, subsidence and changing relations with sewage and drainage. Drawing on ethnographic research, this article uses groundwater as an entry point into the relational constitution of the urban underground.

I argue that governing the underground depends on speculative articulations that connect partial traces to relations extending beyond immediate observation. These articulations take shape across administrative and epistemic cuts that structure who can establish consequential relations between what is observed and what remains uncertain. I use salvage speculation for forms of speculative articulation that depend on observations, knowledge, labour and other capacities generated in relations they do not themselves produce or fully control. As these contributions are taken up and transformed into forms that can guide maintenance, regulation and intervention, the authority to speculate does not necessarily remain with those who produced them.

Across infrastructural functioning, water cleanliness and subterranean monitoring, the article shows how the politics of speculation lies in the cuts through which the underground becomes governable, in whose capacities are drawn across them, and in who can make the resulting articulations consequential.

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The paper talks of a fen that emerged in the Late Pleistocene due to groundwater springs. By asking how things hold together, it shows the balance equation and the groundwater level as just one of the more-than-human practices that coordinate to materialise as something we can still call a fen.

Paper long abstract

The paper presents a case study of a peat fen and its surrounding sandy-soil pine forest, a rare relic of the vast wetlands of Záhorská Lowland (Slovakia) thereby a nature reserve since 1964. These wetlands emerged due to complex Neogene tectonic and postglacial geomorphological development, which caused groundwater springs to rise to the surface in the aeolian interdune slacks.

The expansion of modernist interest in transforming the (ground)water regime and peat extraction already began in the 18th century, and still intensified in the 2nd half of the 1950s. The vast drainage projects essentially destroyed the almost entire area’s hydrological complex.

The accurate groundwater levels are seen as a crucial condition for the fen to remain, i.e. to stay aquatic instead of a terrestrial. Nevertheless, this paper juxtaposes the principle of mass conservation in the hydrological cycle of a peat fen with other than hydrological methods of “measuring” and “speculating” on its existence. By ethnographically tracing the more-than-human practices and temporalities that are brought into coordination and materialise as a historically consequential “assemblage” (Gan&Tsing 2018), it shows the balance equation to be just one practice that makes the fen happen. Moreover, by asking how things still “hold together” at this magical interface rather than reproducing the dominant Anthropocene metanarrative of irreversibilities, I am offering a story where plants, animals, natural gas, drainage tubes, pollen seeds, Lidar system, illegal housing and the proper (ground)water take part on the modelling the patch (Tsing 2024) instead of humans being the only relevant actors.

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When Lipa refugee camp's water supply was sabotaged, hydro-engineering methods soon restored the water flow, without answering the primary problem of water disruption—revealing groundwater care as a practice of navigating invisible resources through speculation and concomitant social frictions.

Paper long abstract

When the drinking water supply to Lipa refugee camp in Bosnia-Herzegovina suddenly failed, a group of water utility company field technicians, engineers, and I—at the time conducting ethnographic fieldwork with them—were called to action. Over days of troubleshooting, we cut through pipes and cleaned the entire camp’s water supply network. Although identifying the source of disruption, clearly an intentional human intervention to stop drinking water supply to the refugee camp, the motivation for this act of sabotage remained unfathomable. In the absence of an identifiable culprit, speculation unfolded during the restoration and maintenance work, coffee and lunch breaks. While hydro-engineering methods restored the drinking water supply, they only offered partial answers to the primary problem of disruption.

This case explores how groundwater care emerges through speculative practices not just as a way to “see” the invisible resource but to navigate the entangled social worlds that sustain (or undermine) its flow. Here, speculation became a collaborative mode of attention, weaving together technical expertise, local knowledge, and the field technicians’ own refugee and war biographies of the Bosnian War in the 1990s. The disruption revealed groundwater as a hydrogeosocial assemblage, where pipes, people, and politics coalesced in unpredictable ways. I argue that such speculative engagements with groundwater expose the frictions and intimacies of water provisioning in crisis settings, where care is distributed unevenly and infrastructure is both a lifeline and a site of contestation. What if “making groundwater visible” means attending to the social infrastructures of attention that hold water systems together?

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I suggest to understand practices of infiltrating water into the soil in agriculture to fight droughts and replenish aquifers as speculative labor with the landscape. I explore how this labor can be understood as more-than-human labor and how farmers engage with the indeterminacies it entails.

Paper long abstract

In various European regions, farmers are starting to counteract industrial terraforming of waterscapes, such as straightening watercourses and drainage, as well as the resulting consequences of droughts and floods. They are doing this by implementing land management practices designed to allow water to infiltrate the ground, by planting hedges, digging ditches, restoring straightened watercourses, and constructing leaky dams. In my contribution, I will draw on my ethnographic fieldwork with farmers in France and Great Britain who implement these water retention measures. I will explore how practices involving the infiltration of water into the soil, the retention of water on the surface and the prevention of runoff can be understood as a speculative labor with the landscape, bringing water into the soil and into aquifers. Drawing on theoretical work on more-than-human labor (Maan Barua) and hybrid labor (Alyssa Battistoni), I will analyze the water retention measures applied by farmers, including their care practices towards the hedges, watercourses, geological formations and soil; their practices of configuring, placing and space; and their responses to landscape conditions. I consider this labor with the landscape to be speculative because it depends on indeterminacies of ecosystems and the possible resistances in the relation between land and water. My contribution will explore how farmers engage with these indeterminacies in their daily work with water retention measures, and how speculative labor with the landscape can be grasped in relation to practices of controlling and managing the water landscape using mapping and monitoring techniques.

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This presentation will seek to open up the question of what it is to learn about groundwater if attention is paid to what farmers and other groundwater users do on the fields, and to their diverse modes of knowing groundwater.

Paper long abstract

Responding to the call of caring for groundwater by making it visible (UN-2022) we follow through ethnographic fieldwork, different agricultural activities on the arid coast of Peru. Here people, in the midst of intensive export agriculture pressures, are involved in everyday activities such as accessing, predicting, sharing and replenishing groundwater. As we follow them in how they pay attention to groundwater to know what is underground, we (the authors) learn about the multiple versions of groundwater embedded in these practices, and how they rely on particular sets of, often more than human, sensibilities, relations and tools.

Acknowledging and engaging with these different modes of knowing (Law 2016) rarely resonates with mainstream scientific language. On contrast to scientific methods, these modes don’t always foreground ‘vision’ to access knowledge. They rather rely on specific configurations, in which ‘touch’ of temperature, textures and specific vibrations are part of their modes of knowing.

Inspired by the recent interest in feminist science and technology studies, regarding “Other ways of paying attention” (Depret 2021; M’charek 2015; Haraway 2007) that suggest that caring for an object of study requires to care for the modes of relating- we hope to care for groundwater by attuning to these partial forms of knowing.