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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.