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Paper short abstract

Taking the river protection campaign as depicted in “River Sisters” (2021) as its point of departure, the paper explores the human-river relationship in the documentary econarrative (Stibbe 2024) through the lens of Posthuman Feminist Phenomenology (Neimanis 2017).

Paper long abstract

As one of the most undervalued and misunderstood resources on our planet, rivers need to be put at the heart of human and more-than-human development and wellbeing. The same holds true for the Vistula River in Poland. Often trapped in the realm of technical data or doom-and-gloom images, the river requires that compelling stories be told to make it personal, as well as to simplify its complex nature. The aim of this paper is to explore the human-river relationship in “River Sisters” (2021), a documentary directed by Cecylia Malik as part the River Sisters campaign to raise social awareness and to aid in the process of reconnecting to the river at multiple levels, from the cognitive one, through emotional, all the way to the experiential one. The analysis will be based on Stibbe (2024)’s approach to econarrative analysis with its linguistic and narratological tools to look into the nature of the river, and the feminine dimension of the river protection campaign, as well as socio-political barriers to regenerative river stewardship. The paper will also revisit certain binaries, such as nature-culture and local-global, as well as explore the human-river relationship as depicted in the documentary through the lens of Posthuman Feminist Phenomenology (Neimanis 2017) – all with the overriding goal to facilitate an ongoing search for new narratives to live by (Stibbe 2024).

Keywords: river, sisterhood, water, human, posthuman, more-than-human, econarrative, hydrofeminism