Format/Structure

A roundtable moderated by the organizers : four speakers will address a set of questions shared in advance for a dynamic and inclusive discussion.

Long Abstract

This panel examines the relationships between populations, drinking water infrastructures, and managing institutions in postcolonial contexts, understood as spaces marked by enduring colonial power relations. It explores how daily supply practices reveal differentiated forms of access to drinking water and the persistence of colonial inequalities. By focusing on water, the panel explores how postcolonial analysis can shed light on infrastructural injustices, while also showing how water practices and conflicts enrich postcolonial critique and its conceptual frameworks.

It invites contributions that address, among other possibilities, the following themes:

• Day-to-day negotiation with institutional arrangements: This theme deconstructs the opposition between citizens and institutions by analyzing everyday interactions around multiple drinking water infrastructures and waters (Lemanski, 2019; Vogt & Walsh, 2021). These negotiations highlight the micropolitics of infrastructure and the entanglement of authority, legitimacy, and lived experience in postcolonial contexts (Le Meur, 2025).

• Hierarchization of knowledge and representations around drinking water: this theme questions how certain socio-technical knowledge about water are hierarchized and claimed in light of daily water supply practices (Kooy & Bakker, 2008). On the one hand, it questions the processes of legitimization or exclusion of certain knowledge about and, on the other hand, it allows to document how individuals inhabit their territory.

• Access and production of identities through drinking water infrastructures: this theme ultimately aims to explore how these different forms of access to drinking water can shape (or not) communities and identities (Domínguez-Guzmán et al., 2021). This may help to contextualize “decolonial” approaches applied to reflections on access to water.

Adopting a cross-disciplinary approach, the panel draws on academic, activist and artistic work from various postcolonial situations to document these dynamics and stimulate reflection on environmental justice.

This Roundtable has 4 pending paper proposals.
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