Send message to Author

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?