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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.
Accepted papers
Session 1Paper short abstract
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.
Paper short abstract
Groundwater moves through urban layers, intersecting sewage pipes, sediments, animals, and infrastructures. Drawing on research in Ho Chi Minh City, this presentation shows how speculative subterranean realities are enacted, proposing groundwater as a pluriversal knowledge object.
Paper long abstract
While numerous ethnographic studies examine water as an element endowed with identity-forming corporeality, research on groundwater is often framed as a phenomenon lacking tangible materiality. The few approaches that engage with groundwater emphasize its elusive matter, which frequently becomes “touchable” only through models, diagrams, or images (e.g. Ballestero 2019). Yet groundwater intersects with other subterranean infrastructures such as piped sewage systems and circulates through heterogeneous layers of rock and sand, meeting animals or historical remnants. Groundwater’s materiality is difficult to grasp while its aqueous purity often persists more as an illusion than a material condition.
Drawing on underground infrastructure works on sewage and groundwater channels in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, this presentation examines how different actors engage with this complex subterranean environment. Engineers, urban planners and residents hold partially conflicting understandings of the watery underground. These differences shape distinct practices of use, maintenance and care, producing divergent sociomaterial realities and framing different expectations about what kinds of knowledge are needed to address environmental change.
These empirical frictions point to a broader conceptual question about what kind of entity groundwater actually is. I argue that its hybrid nature, what it is and how it comes to exist, emerges through layered relationships between humans, nonhumans and infrastructures. From this perspective, the paper proposes a speculative approach that treats groundwater as a pluriversal knowledge object whose reality is constituted through practices, perceptions and interventions through time and space.
Paper short abstract
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.
Paper short abstract
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?
Paper short abstract
This paper examines how Wayúu women in La Guajira, Colombia, make groundwater perceptible through embodied bioindicators such as taste, smell, dreams, animal behavior, and infrastructural signals. It shows how these practices produce hydofeminist leadership and alternative ways of knowing aquifers.
Paper long abstract
Groundwater is often described as difficult to govern because it is invisible. Hydrogeological approaches have developed methods to render aquifers legible and manageable. Yet these techniques frequently isolate groundwater from the social and ecological relations through which it is experienced and interpreted. Drawing on insights from the hydrosocial cycle literature (Linton & Budds, 2014), this paper examines how groundwater becomes perceptible through everyday engagements that extend beyond conventional hydrogeological methods.
The study is based in Wayúu communities in La Guajira, a semi-arid region of Colombia, where groundwater constitutes the primary water source for Indigenous populations. In this region, water scarcity is shaped not only by climatic variability but also by extractive expansion and uneven state presence(Ulloa, 2016). Building on Latin American feminist political ecology and the water–body–territory framework (Cabnal, 2010), the paper analyzes how Wayúu women interpret and manage deep wells through what we term embodied bioindicators.
These indicators include sensory perceptions such as taste, smell, color, and tactile reactions to saline water, as well as dreams, animal behavior, vegetation stress, and infrastructural failures. We argue that these practices constitute alternative modes of making groundwater visible, where aquifer dynamics are inferred through distributed sensory systems involving human and non-human bodies.
Through these engagements, Wayúu women develop forms of hydrofeminist leadership, as their capacity to interpret groundwater conditions and sustain water infrastructures generates situated authority over water governance. In doing so, they challenge technocratic regimes of groundwater knowledge and reconfigure the subsurface as a space of territorial care and political contestation.
Paper short abstract
We analyse the challenges a desert community meets in the collective mobilisation around aquifer recharge and groundwater use. Renewing the profound and shared knowledge required to maintain a perennial water source, and maintaining a collective vision of water challenge this mobilisation.
Paper long abstract
In the Beni Isguen oasis in the Algerian Sahara, the secular knowledge of groundwater dynamics has been acquired over centuries through intermittent flood-based aquifer recharge and regular groundwater use. The 2025 autumn floods, after a long period of drought, showcased once again the community mobilisation around water with traditional water stewards (Umana Essayl) guiding the water to the different recharge infrastructures of the oasis, along with considerable participation of the community. However, contemporary agricultural development schemes upstream of the oasis, and more largely the penetration of ‘modern’ water in the Sahara, have perturbed the community-based organisation of flood management. First, farmers in modern extensions built hastily (and individually) several small dykes a few days before the flood arrived to collect water. After noticing that volumes arriving at the downstream dam were abnormally low, the Umana reported to the authorities, who intervened to destroy the dykes. Isotopic analysis of water samples confirmed that in the extensions, floodwater had replenished the aquifer. Little change occurred in the oasis signalling low recharge. Second, many young people followed the event, notably documenting it with smartphones. Yet, they did not know the exact time of the flood's arrival, showing the problematic intergenerational knowledge transmission. The Umana, on the other hand, had accurate information about the floods, sharing videos taken in real time. Both events show the challenges the community meets in upkeeping/renewing shared knowledge of and collective action around groundwater, which are the result of an accumulation of everyday interactions with aquifers and between people.
Paper short abstract
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.
Paper short abstract
This paper examines dowsing as a speculative and care-ful practice through which groundwater is made visible and present across sites. Dowsers locate and interpret groundwater through tools, bodily sensing and environmental signals that are continuously calibrated and adjusted.
Paper long abstract
Within hydrogeology and other scientific approaches to water, dowsing is largely discarded and dismissed as a superstitious and cultural activity; something unscientific. However, in many groundwater-dependent worlds it remains a crucial practice through which people attempt to locate and make sense of hidden waters. Based on ethnographic research across sites (India, Peru, Tanzania, Zimbabwe, Netherlands), this paper examines dowsing as an art of prediction: a speculative and care-ful practice through which practitioners make groundwater visible and present. Rather than treating dowsing as belief, we focus on what dowsers do in different case studies. By working with rods, pendants and coconuts; attuning bodily sensations; and noticing vegetation, soils, creature activity, and topography, dowsers assemble and interpret multiple signals and indicators to infer and anticipate where water might be found and at what depth.
Following STS and ANT approaches that consider methods as performative practices, we explore how dowsing knowledges across sites enact groundwater (worlds)l through signals and speculation. Herein we argue that dowsing is not only predictive but also a care-ful practice: one that is meticulous, situated and iterative, shaped through tinkering with tools, environments, and experience. We conclude by asserting that dowser knowledges on where to find hidden groundwater does not emerge from a single moment of revelation, but is enacted through continuous adjustments, embodied attentiveness, and collective calibrations. By foregrounding this art of prediction, the paper hopes to create space for more plural and attentive approaches to groundwater.
Paper short abstract
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.