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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.