Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

I capture the scientific discourse on water as a form of folklore, characterized by its intertwining with local knowledge, and its evolution into narratives of care, resistance and responsiblity in the post-truth era. These narratives influence ecological imagination, solidarity and community action

Paper long abstract

This paper examines how scientific narratives about the protection of water resources function as a form of contemporary folklore—distinct modes of storytelling that, like myths or parables, shape values, mobilize communities, and legitimize claims. Drawing on long-term ethnographic research in Rogoźno Commune in western Poland, I explore how expert accounts of drought, inland water reclamation, river restoration, biodiversity loss, and hydro-infrastructure circulate, intertwine with local ecological knowledge, and are reinterpreted as “usable narratives” in struggles over water.

In this context, scientific expertise does not merely provide facts; it produces stories. Hydrologists’ reports, activist conferences, and biomonitoring data become tales that, once reframed by local actors, travel alongside rumors of contamination and memories of the past conditions of rivers and lakes. These hybrid narratives illuminate both mechanisms of power—by exposing institutional neglect and infrastructural violence—and practices of care, as they sustain ecological imagination and community solidarity.

By approaching scientific discourse as a narrative genre, I suggest that expertise is best understood not as an authoritative transfer of truth but as a form of storytelling embedded in social life. Like folklore, these stories are repeated, contested, and adapted, revealing their cultural work in moments of environmental conflict.

In the post-truth condition, such “scientific folklore” helps us see how truth claims are negotiated in practice and how narratives—whether expert, local, or more-than-human—become infrastructures of ecological responsibility and fragile hope.