Presentation short abstract

This paper examines three water initiatives in the Rhenish Mining District through hydrofeminist figurations (monsters, cyborgs, water ghosts). I analyze how these groups challenge technocratic, extractive narratives through multiplying human-water relations and stories in post-mining landscapes.

Presentation long abstract

The Rhenish lignite mining district in Germany is undergoing fundamental transformation. Decades of open-pit mining produced massive hydrorelational interruptions. This paper presents three case studies of initiatives that challenge dominant technocratic water narratives and struggle to multiply water (futures) in post-mining landscapes.

The first examines the River Guardians of the Rhineland Water Plenum countering the normalization of infrastructural disruption. The second analyzes the initiative Save the Gillbach, fighting to preserve a stream whose source today only exists through cooling water. The third explores Walking with Water Ghosts, my curatorial-ethnographic project addressing (post-)mining water bodies as spectral entities that exceed spatiotemporal boundaries.

I propose reading these activities through three feminist figurations: monsters, cyborgs (Haraway 1985, 1991), and water ghosts. Through the monster, Rhineland waters become material-semiotic boundary figures and companions to inhabit damaged hydrorelational environments. The Gillbach emerges as a cyborgian stream, a techno-natural hybrid whose infrastructural dependencies expose ambivalent entanglements of water and energy regimes. Walking with Water Ghosts deploys a hydrofeminist hauntology to reveal spatiotemporal ruptures, linking the future Hambach Lake to water territories in Colombia, criticizing green colonialism while insisting on planetary water justice.

Methodologically, my empirical work draws on Composite Curating, combining curating (Bismarck 2021), collective ethnography (Hetherington 2025), walking-with (Springgay & Truman 2018), and hydrofeminist phenomenology (Neimanis 2017). By engaging with these waters through feminist figurations while walking-with water I want to discuss how such transdiciplinary, curatorial “knowledge exchange events” (Harrison 2015) produce “third stories” (Sørensen/Laser 2021) cultivating attention for troubled waters in the Rhenish district.

Presentation short abstract

A discussion between an artist and a PhD student on the rise of the River Regeneration Movement Inspired by Beavers (RRMB) in France, focusing on multi-species alliances around rivers and the role of art in making alternative visions visible.

Presentation long abstract

Confronted with accelerating environmental degradation and recurrent droughts, new movements are emerging that seek to make alternative river imaginaries and practices visible (Boelens & al., 2023). In this context, we analyse the rise of the River Regeneration Movement inspired by Beavers (RRMB), a heterogeneous assemblage of citizens, environmentalists, artists, farmers, beavers, and river professionals. Our contribution brings together the perspectives of the artist Suzanne Husky who initiated and helped spark this movement (Husky & Morizot, 2024)—by importing practices from the western United States (Jordan &Faifax, 2022)—and a PhD researcher in geography Samuel Pinjon who studies the transformative effects of such initiatives on water policies.

Our presentation examines how the RRMB has activated an imaginary around what is a "alive river", challenging dominant river-management paradigms by proposing a dynamic and relational understanding of rivers and lands. We first explore the epistemic dimension of the movement, focusing on the circulation of scientific knowledge from the United States to France and the renewed attention to empirical and experiential ways of “reading” rivers. We then discuss the role of artistic practices as both representation tools for thinking rivers differently and as vectors for experimenting with alternative restoration techniques. The presentation also addresses the strategies adopted when engaging with river professionals, highlighting the controversies and frictions that arise from these encounters. The place and role of beavers, what the RRMB learns from them and to what extent drawing inspiration from their expertise is a matter of multi-species justice (Houart, 2024).

Presentation short abstract

Understanding rivers as living beings and multispecies communities encourages us to analyse political processes for their defence from a multispecies justice perspective. This presentation does so through the stories of the Piatúa River in Ecuador and the Maas River in the Netherlands.

Presentation long abstract

What subjects do we acknowledge and whose voices do we listen to in political practices and decision-making processes for river defence around the world? Departing from an understanding of rivers as living entities and multispecies communities, I propose looking at processes for river defence from a multispecies justice perspective, one that is attentive to the subjecthood, agency, needs, and interests of human and other-than-human beings in river territories. In particular, an important question is: how are non-human beings (e.g., rivers themselves, animals, plants) included, represented, or excluded and misrepresented in political processes around rivers, for instance, in response to extractivism or restoration projects? I argue that, in order to pursue or attain some form of MSJ in these processes, people need to integrate embodied, affective, and creative methodologies, practices, and epistemologies, in order to better attune and respond to more-than-human communities in rivers. I demonstrate this by sharing examples from two case studies: the movement in defence of the Piatúa River in the Ecuadorian Amazon rainforest, led by local Kichwa river defenders; and the artistic project Maas Lab in the southern Netherlands, which engages with the Maas River as a living subject and partner in the process of artistic (co)creation. These movements and experiments reimagine and reconfigure both hydrosocial territories and relationships between human beings, rivers, and their multispecies communities.

Presentation short abstract

We offer findings from Watershed Moments, a project to bring the River Don’s emerging digital identities into conversation with the embodied experiences of humans. We explore how experimental, cyborg forms of mediation created by the River Dôn Project generate connection, affect, and alienation.

Presentation long abstract

The River Don flows 110km across South Yorkshire, UK. For centuries it has been exploited and controlled by humans, including a major rerouting in the 1620s. Mining and metal works discharged waste to such a degree that the river contained no fish from the late 19th century until the 1980s. Abandoned mines continue to leach toxins, while in 2024 there were 1,829 instances of sewage dumping covering 40 sites. Yet, the river has enacted its own agency. Major flooding events in 2007 and 2019 have unsettled its relationship with neighbouring communities. Salmon have begun to spawn again. The River Don and its human communities are deeply entangled, co-creating landscapes and ecologies.

Since 2022 the River Dôn Project has explored whether a river has rights, and the systems required to achieve this, building experimental digital platforms to encourage stewardship. This includes a community-owned digital twin, aiming to hold stakeholders to account, and a storytelling chatbot that converts river data into powerful narratives. We offer findings from the Watershed Moments project that bring the river’s emerging digital identities (from sewage to stewardship) into conversation with the embodied experiences of humans. The project explores how the RDP’s digital platforms generate cyborg forms of mediation between humans and nonhumans. We examine how these generate forms of connection, affective experiences and opportunities for political mobilisation, or potentially alienate people from the lively-ness of the river. The presentation features creative research methods, including reflexive river walks, demonstrating how research can both critique and affirm river movements.

Presentation short abstract

We immerse into experiences of river swimmers and explore embodied entanglements between human and ecological wellbeing. We weave together stories from Rivers Thames, Derwent & Wharfe, exploring the implications of swimming for swimmers’ wellbeing and the watery worlds they immerse themselves in.

Presentation long abstract

We discuss ongoing projects that immerse into the experiences of river swimmers and explore embodied entanglements between human and ecological wellbeing. We weave together stories from the Rivers Thames, Derwent and Wharfe, gathered through multi-sensory, place-based methodologies such as swim-along and riverbank interviews. In so doing, we respond to geographer Hannah Pitt’s (2018) call to consider a ‘wider palette of water experiences’, centring watery spaces that are often not glitteringly blue, but earthy green, rusty red and cloudy brown. Indeed, these rivers are always murky, contradictory in their ability to draw human and more-than-human beings into relations where both wellbeing and sickness ebb and flow. The growth in outdoor swimming in the UK has been matched by growing threats to the nation’s rivers. Reports continually tell us of the fragile state of the nation’s freshwater ecosystems, suffocated by agricultural run-off, sickened by sewage, and contaminated with forever chemicals. Outdoor swimming can therefore be both restorative and healing, polluted and risky. We delve into this paradox, asking whether the relations that emerge through outdoor swimming are rejuvenating and if so, for whom? Through investigating these riverine relations, we can critically examine the potential of the practice to shift human perspectives of multispecies watery worlds. As Rebecca Olive (2022) powerfully captures, ‘Swimming is not conceptual or metaphorical – it is a set of relations to ourselves and to what else is there.’ We centre these relations, exploring their implications for the wellbeing of swimmers and the watery worlds they immerse themselves in.

Presentation short abstract

DRINK THE RIVER is a video game and expanded animation, offering a critical (re)imagination of the River Eden in Cumbria, northern England. Through moving between the worlds of river and human body in the game, porosity between watery bodies is emphasized and human-river-sewage-cycle explored.

Presentation long abstract

DRINK THE RIVER is a collaboration between artist and researcher Rosa Prosser, and animation artist and programmer Christopher Bonk.

Due to sewage pollution into the River Eden (the Eden is in the top 20 most polluted rivers in the UK) and land ownership difficulties, access to and into the river is contested. Responding to these difficulties of directly entering the river, we developed a video game titled "Drink the River", building the world of the river into game format, to reimagine our access and immersion.

Through the world building of the game, we explored direct and indirect relations between the river and ourselves - the game moves between the river and the human body, allowing for a very literal exploration of our intra-actions with the river, reminding the player that we are in fact bodies of water. We are now working on a project in VR, taking the idea of gaming and world building to explore the entanglements of history, industry, people, and ecology in the River Emscher, Germany.

The form of a game gives playful exploration of these issues - allowing for all ages to engage and opening access beyond those directly in contact with the river. The space of the game also allows for (re)imaginations, something we are especially interested in - how can thinking through and with the river in a different form, open conversations for how we can redraw boundaries, definitions, and (re)imagine (playful) possible futures.

Presentation short abstract

Climate-resilience claims mask hydrosocial injustice in the Seomjin basin, as displaced communities use collective action to resist continued authoritarian-legacy dam construction. They reclaim the river as a shared hydrosocial territory sustained by connectivity, reciprocity, and living memory.

Presentation long abstract

This paper examines how technocratic water governance reproduces hydrosocial injustice in South Korea’s Seomjin–Yeongsan river system. A proposed reservoir above Juam Dam threatens to displace communities in Sapyeong-myeon while deepening the inter-basin transfer of Seomjin water to the Yeongsan basin. Many community members were previously displaced during authoritarian-era dam expansions of the early 1980s—when rivers across the peninsula were being re-engineered as state-produced, more-than-human waterscapes (Kim, 2019)–a period when political repression made objection nearly impossible. These histories shape present-day interpretations of state-led water governance: as one elder observed of the Yeongsan River, it was “dying then and is dead now,” the result of policy failures and decisions made without informing or involving the people most affected.

Through in-depth interviews with members of the Dongbokcheon Climate Response Dam Countermeasures Committee and local experts, and workshops at the Water Love Learning Center in Hwasun, this study explores how people narrate involvement in the movement, experiences of displacement, and attachments to the waterways sustaining their cultural and ecological worlds, using arts-based methods similar to Korean scholarship with the goal of revitalizing river-based ecological–cultural relations (Choi & Hwang, 2019). Rather than accepting official portrayals of the Seomjin as a “pristine” resource available for extraction, participants situate the river within lived histories of diversion and loss. By foregrounding storytelling, embodied knowledge, and memory, the paper shows how people unsettle technocratic adaptation claims—including those aligned with AI modeling and digital-twin hydrology—and articulate alternative possibilities for justice within heavily engineered waterscapes (Sultana, 2022; Boelens et al., 2016).

Presentation short abstract

The paper presents new data collected by indigenous researchers from the Western Amazon, revealing how river travel navigates more-than-human relations, plural knowledges and ambitious plans for road building. In doing so, we speak back to the hegemony of roads and infrastructure-led development.

Presentation long abstract

In this paper, I present early findings from a new project on infrastructural political ecology in the Western Amazon. I am working with a team of 8 Indigenous researchers who are using smart phones and visual methods to research their territories from rivers. We ask how river travel navigates (and informs) more-than-human relations and plural knowledges, as well as underpins particular forms of territorial politics in the face of ambitious plans for road building and large-scale extractivism. In doing so, we extend debates on infrastructure with more-than-human political ecology and speak back to the hegemony of roads and infrastructure-led development.

Presentation short abstract

Shaped by centuries of human–nature interaction, Mediterranean rivers like the Riu dels Sants become contested socio-ecological arenas where irrigation demands and renaturalization efforts collide, opening pathways to articulate principles and practices for governing hybrid waterscapes

Presentation long abstract

In the Mediterranean region, the configuration of numerous rivers is the result of a prolonged interaction between humans and nature, which has shaped hybrid systems—or cyborg rivers—primarily through the historical development of traditional gravity-fed irrigation networks. The processes and forms of these agro-ecosystems do not fit neatly within conventional approaches to the conservation of natural systems and pose significant challenges for their management, as they are sometimes subjected to either conservationist or productivist pressures that disrupt the historical equilibria of these artefacts of nature and culture.

What happens when renaturalization initiatives are proposed that call into question the cultural values or hydraulic heritage of these systems? How can new agricultural or urban projects that may intensify the artificialization of these rivers be restrained?

This study examines the case of the Riu dels Sants, a river of barely 6 km that has been extensively transformed to harness its waters for irrigation over several centuries. In this context, farmers are planning the installation of a parallel conduit for strictly agricultural use, while neighbouring municipalities seek to halt this intervention and pursue the renaturalization of the river channel and its banks. Drawing on interviews with key stakeholders involved in this conflict, this research addresses not only the analysis of the different conceptions or fluvial imaginaries but also offers a reflection aimed at sparking crucial questions about the governance of such hybrid waterscapes.

Presentation short abstract

Modernist-capitalist imaginaries and cartographies re-order rivers as extraction sites. New water justice movements arise to defend river commons. Bridging them translocally, Riverhood’s framework and countermapping endeavors engage with these struggles to contest grabbing and misrepresentation

Presentation long abstract

Mega-damming, pollution and depletion endanger rivers worldwide. Meanwhile, modernist imaginaries of ordering ‘unruly waters and humans’ have become cornerstones of hydrocratic and market-driven development. They frame the hydro/social as capitalist techno-political cyborg natures, sidelining river-commons cultures and deepening socio-environmental injustices. The corresponding cartographic governance techniques re-present rivers’ nature and society as extraction sites, legitimizing the grabbing and degeneration of peasant-, indigenous- and fishing-commons’ territories. But myriad new water justice movements proliferate: rooted, transdisciplinary, multi-scalar coalitions that deploy alternative river–society ontologies, bridge South–North divides, and translate river-enlivening practices from local to global and vice-versa.

In the presentation, I first present a collective framework that conceptualizes ‘riverhood’ to engage with these movements and commoning initiatives. It suggests four interrelated ontologies: ‘river-as-ecosociety’, ‘river-as-territory’, ‘river-as-subject’, and ‘river-as-movement’. Second, I examine the Traveling Rivers initiative, linking grassroots artist-activism, engaged academia and river commoning struggles through counter-mapping. Bridging six river conflict-arenas in Colombia and Ecuador, local knowledges, strategies and struggles converse and cross-pollinate across contexts, invigorating ‘living with the river’ proposals and forging river-defense networks. Grassroots counter-mapping among socio-fluvial struggles may mobilize new concepts and strategies to contest river grabbing and misrepresentation, strengthening ‘rivers of resistance’ that break away from imposed status quo river governance.

Presentation short abstract

The Meuse River is completely controlled by dams, weirs, dykes and bioengineered implants. In line with this, many deep (former sand extraction) lakes along the Meuse were filled with toxic waste as “nature-based solution”. After years of struggle, grassroots organizations halted this waste dumping.

Presentation long abstract

In 2019, four men from the small southern Dutch village of Dreumel uncovered a major environmental crime occurring practically in their own backyard. A dredging company had been dumping waste and polluted soil into a former sand-extraction pit—a deep lake directly connected to the River Meuse. The Meuse itself has long been transformed into a highly engineered water system: regulated by dams, weirs, dykes, groyns, parallel canals, and bioengineered implants (like fish passages), and continually controlled through real-time digital hydrological modelling. This has turned the river into a “cyborg river”: optimized for shipping and flood management, but leaving its aquatic ecosystems at wreck. In line with this bioengineering, the Over de Maas lake—and many other deep lakes along the Meuse River—was being filled with contaminated soil and granulite, a by-product of gravel-making used in asphalt production that contains carcinogenic flocculants. Officially, the lakes were being “undeepened” to make them more natural, presented as a “nature-based solution.” In reality, the rationale was that large quantities of polluted soil and roughly 300,000 tons of granulite must be disposed of each year, and filling deep lakes with toxic waste had become a profitable business model. The local organization responded by employing citizen science to trace the origins of the waste. They organized protests and amplified their struggle by engaging national media, political parties, and environmental groups. After years of persistent effort, in 2024 the dumping of toxic waste into deep lakes in the Netherlands was brought under much stricter regulations.

Presentation short abstract

River networks, a man-made river system relying on electric pumps, were constructed in 20th century East China for boosting agricultural production. The system provides livelihood for boat people, but their mobility was deprived by ‘ecological conservation’ policies that banned inland navigation.

Presentation long abstract

River networks (hewang, 河网) in East China are a type of man-made agricultural ecosystem created through numerous politically-driven mass campaigns from the late 1950s to the late 1970s. The management and operation of this delicate system rely largely on electric pumps running on electricity generated by fossil fuels. However, river networks expanded the cultivation of irrigated rice and improved agricultural output with much less local ecological impact than conventional irrigation systems like canal and well irrigation. Planned to integrate irrigation and drainage, it seldom caused secondary salination like in conventional canal irrigation projects. And unlike well irrigation, river networks used surface water, so they replenished rather than extracted underground water. Furthermore, river networks provided important livelihoods for the ‘boat people’, a usually underprivileged rural group that dwelled on boats and made a living from water transport. Since the 2000s, however, inland navigation has been banned on many river networks and navigation facilities like locks were demolished in the state’s attempt to ‘conserve the river ecosystem’. Small ferrocement boats used by the boat people have also been unanimously banned from entering major rivers in the system, virtually deprived the boat people of their mobility. Based on numerous fieldworks and interviews, this research explores how a man-made ecosystem largely relying on the energy input of fossil fuels can be vital to the survival of underprivileged local communities and how the pursuit of ‘ecological conservation’ is gradually depriving their livelihoods.

Presentation short abstract

With 76 participants, our multispecies role-playing game on the Rhine generated eco-centric river-restoration scenarios and enabled non-human representation, river commoning practice, social learning. Such RPGs are potential tools for integrating nonhuman perspectives into European water governance.

Presentation long abstract

European water governance frameworks have long treated water as a “resource” or “service,” leaving nonhuman entities largely marginalized within official decision-making processes. Yet riverscapes are socio-ecological networks where human and nonhuman actors co-create and co-transform. Emerging participatory approaches like role-playing games (RPGs) offer experimental spaces for understanding, experimenting nonhuman perspectives and multispecies justice. Consequently, we developed the RPG Speaking as a Proxy for Non-Humans in Defending the Rights of the Rhine, composed exclusively of 9 nonhuman roles representing the Rhine (a highly regulated ecosystem in Europe) basin’s ecological communities. We conducted 5 workshops in Strasbourg with 76 scientists and students, who collectively designed varied Rhine-restoration strategies and governance proposals centering nonhuman needs and interests. Through analysis of the proposed scenarios, teamwork dynamics, and participants’ feedback, we show that RPGs can raise awareness of nonhuman agency, encourage eco-centric proposals, and stimulate ethical, political encounters with the “mother river”, even when the nonhuman representations remain mediated by human knowledge systems. The RPG facilitated context-specific river commoning practices that supported inclusive decision-making processes grounded in interspecies interdependencies and negotiation, echoing both local and global Rights of Nature movements. We also observed social learning outcomes that may inform future civic river stewardship. We argue that integrating RPGs into real-world water governance, e.g., through the institutionalization of interspecies councils, can help move multispecies justice beyond a “utopian desire.” This RPG is part of the French OneWater program and being considered as a creative decision-support tool to incorporate nonhuman perspectives into water policy frameworks in Europe.

Presentation short abstract

This presentation demonstrates how state narratives presents the river as a controllable resource, while residents’ practices reimagine it as a shared, vibrant space, exposing tensions between technocracy and lived hydrosocial realities.

Presentation long abstract

This presentation demonstrates how the El Harrach River in Algiers—a once vital urban waterway later suffocated by pollution and neglect—has been shaped by Algeria’s hydrocarbon-centred governance. Drawing on hydrosocial territories, frame analysis and ethnographic research, it explores how state narratives configure the river as an economic resource to be controlled and purified in order to maintain social stability, rather than as part of a living hydrosocial territory.

This study reveals that Algeria’s dependence on fossil fuels profoundly structures how rivers and water more broadly are imagined and governed. Policy discourses that present water as a “national priority” remain deeply entangled with extractivist logics that privilege hydrocarbons as the foundation of modernity and stability. This framing marginalises socio-ecological understandings of water bodies and neglect alternative attachments to the El Harrach as a place of memory, livelihood, and communal life.

At the same time, residents living along the river’s course express affective and embodied relations that contest official framings. Through their narratives and everyday practices, they reimagine the El Harrach as more than a polluted drainage canal, calling for its revival as a shared, vibrant site of heritage. These local visions expose the dissonance between state-led technocratic imaginaries and lived hydrosocial realities.

By situating the El Harrach river within wider debates on riverhood, extractivism, and postcolonial environmental governance, the presentation aims to highlight how hydrocarbon-dependent states configure watery worlds and how communities strive to re-politicise and reanimate them beyond the confines of extractive modernity.

Presentation short abstract

Marañon River was recognised as rights holder in 2024. Its ruling established that both the indigenous riverine organisations and the Peruvian State will be its guardians and defenders. This process is a political milestone and a cultural challenge.

Presentation long abstract

This communication reflects on the context in which civil society organised to request and obtain the recognition of the Marañón River and its tributaries as legal subjects from a court in Nauta (Peru) on 8 March 2024. In this ruling, it is established that both the indigenous riverine organisations and the Peruvian State will be its guardians, defenders and representatives, and that they will organise themselves into a Basin Committee. While this process is a political milestone, it is also a cultural challenge.

Since the beginning of the century, the Kukama people have achieved remarkable visibility and political agency, which contrasts with their strategic invisibility a few decades ago. Organisations such as ACODECOSPAT, Huaynakana, the Catholic Vicariate and Radio Ucamara, along with other international organisations, have articulated territorial and identity claims in an international context that, on the one hand, was advancing in terms of indigenous and nature rights, but on the other, extractivism and corruption make their existence difficult. The communication seeks to reflect on the scenario opened up by the recognition of the Marañón River and its tributaries as subjects of rights in a context marked by power relations and conflicts between indigenous organisations and the state, by corruption and “developmentalist” ideology. The proposal of nature's rights aligns with conservationism and the ecocentric turn in law, but it presents limitations for both environmental conservation and the co-governance of rivers and indigenous territories.