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- Convenors:
-
Carolina Domínguez Guzmán
(IHE Delft)
Margreet Zwarteveen (IHE Delft)
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- Format:
- Traditional Open Panel
Short Abstract
Based on ethnographical fieldwork of places that undergo groundwater depletion in different regions of the world, this panel addresses the issue of groundwater’s invisibility and the method practices that are used to pay attention to groundwater.
Description
It is often said that groundwater’s invisibility makes it notoriously difficult to govern, thereby hampering efforts to prevent depletion or pollution. Hydrogeologists have mobilized a range of methods (including proxies, tracers, measurements and models) to make groundwater visible. Where these tend to isolate groundwater from interactions with other waters and humans, recent contributions by social scientists to the study of groundwater and aquifer dynamics instead focus on the importance of these interactions, showing that groundwater is far from being a coherent and confined subsurface resource. Through various engagements with groundwater – ranging from practices of hand well-digging (Cleaver et al. 2023); dowsing (Verzijl et al. 2023); growing trees with deep roots (Khoumsi et al. 2017); or attending to soil moisture in irrigation ponds (Domínguez-Guzmán et al. 2017) these studies show that people have diverse ways of paying attention to groundwater in ways that complement and sometimes challenge traditional scientific methods.
Following recent STS interest to study methods as performative practices, this panel responds to the call “to make groundwater visible” by expanding the methods through which groundwater knowledge is produced.
Our starting premise is that all versions of knowing groundwater require some degree of speculation: its presence is always inferred from indicators and tools. Doing this opens up space to recognize and take seriously other than hydrogeological modes of making groundwater visible (imagined, noticed, attended to) and other versions of groundwater, thereby also potentially multiplying how groundwater is cared for. We invite papers and multimodal presentations based on ethnographical work that contribute to this opening up and to thinking trough speculative engagements with groundwater realities.