Presentation short abstract

The study unpacks how urban canals reveal water’s expressive materiality. A relational, context-sensitive canal rejuvenation project, which challenges technocratic restoration, traces how canal degradation reflects governance, waste, ecology and shifting perceptions of water as a living system.

Presentation long abstract

Through the case of the Alappuzha canals in Kerala, India, we attend to material and relational qualities of water by unpacking the process of canal restoration. During such interventions, water is typically treated as an inert medium requiring correction through technocratic approaches – an epistemic stance that obscures the lived relationships, socio-historical inequalities, and ecological rhythms that shape waterways. In this study, we examine a relational and context-sensitive project that co-develops solutions to canal degradation through attention to the myriad socio-political, institutional and ecological factors that affect the canal.

The project conceptualises the canal’s materiality as expressive - its cracked linings, collapsing banks, varying sediment loads, and intermittent flow patterns ‘speak’ to local governance struggles, community practices, and everyday negotiations with socio-environmental changes. Using a qualitative research design, we trace how different stakeholders negotiate risk, health, inconvenience, and responsibility while enabling (and resisting) practices of restoration, monitoring and maintenance. Findings illuminate how the canal is shaped by monsoons, cultural histories, waste infrastructures and ‘urban development’ and how as an expressive material actor, it lays bare the political, infrastructural, and cultural relations that produced its current condition. We also document shifts in perception, from canals as a passive conduit to an active, living system embedded in Kerala’s estuarine ecologies. This paper contributes to (re)materialisation of Political Ecology by centering the expressive materiality of this vital waterway, wherein water reclaims its place as an active participant in shaping ecological futures and governance possibilities in coastal South India.

Presentation short abstract

Small-scale farmers in Morocco’s Drâa Valley sustain sacred, relational practices of water as baraka and amana, despite drought and state-led techno-scientific interventions. Their knowledge elucidate water’s materiality as lived, ethical and communal.

Presentation long abstract

In the past few decades, Morocco's Drâa Valley has seen increased drought conditions along with techno-scientific interventions, such as the El Mansour Eddahbi hydro-dam and the Noor Ouarzazate solar complex, which have further constricted water access for small-scale farmers in the region and intensified the precarity of desert ecologies.

This paper centers the other-world-making imaginaries of water and its versatile materiality in the inherited knowledge-practices of small-scale farmers living in the semi-arid localities of Zagora and Ouarzazate, who despite the continuous re-engineering of waterways away from their known and intricate communal systems and into hierarchical state-controlled technologies, have maintained sacred and intimate relationships with water.

For these farmers, water is seen and treated as baraka (blessing) and amana (sacred responsibility) because of its centrality in sustaining life within their fragile desert ecologies. Their relationship to water appears in the language they use, often assigning human qualities to water; in their daily rhythms, where it structures the cyclical movement between the dār (home) and the jnān (small farmland); and through twiza/tiwizi, the ancient and enduring cooperative practices that organize their lives.

By mapping water’s materiality outside of simplified data points, metric flows, and climate patterns aimed at justifying its extraction and control, this paper demonstrates how water’s materiality lives intimately in the socio-spiritual worlds of small-scale farmers, where it is cared for, loved, shared and grieved.

Presentation short abstract

Building on scholarship in STS, embodied ecologies and new materialism, this presentation probes the material reality of groundwater change, differently apprehended by actors based on their caste position and institutional location, and parsed through epistemic hierarchies.

Presentation long abstract

The material reality of groundwater in India’s Kaveri delta is contested. The governmental discourse portrays relative abundance and stability, informed by shallow, conveniently located monitoring wells. In contrast are the narratives of the delta’s residents, emphasising decline and salinisation. However, even among residents, groundwater (degradation) carries different meanings, based on their caste/class-based interactions with its materiality -- to large upper-caste land owners, groundwater salinisation is understood as ‘ppt measurements’ of laboratory-tested water samples, and represents the challenge of continuing paddy cultivation. Dalit landless residents are more concerned about kidney diseases from drinking salty groundwater. Their phenomenological understanding of salinisation is based on water’s taste, its residues caking canals and cooking vessels, the yellowing of rice cooked in it, and their embodied experiences of disease from drinking it. Yet, they are keen to see their lived experiences through the Western scientific register, illustrating the 'hybridity' of majority-world perspectives -- during my fieldwork, Dalit villagers were particularly enthusiastic about using TDS meters to validate and legitimise their embodied understandings of groundwater salinity.

Therefore, tied to the question of 'what is happening to the delta’s groundwater' are epistemological and methodological questions around knowledge production. While there is no singular way of understanding (ground)water, knowledges are neither equally powerful nor equally valid; yet they cumulatively shape the materiality of the resource. This presentation interrogates two related questions, of 'whose knowledge counts' and 'which knowledge is valid', and how to arbitrate among their sometimes divergent answers, amid colonial, caste-based and institutional hierarchies.

Presentation short abstract

Drawing on ethnographic research and building on scholarship in Dalit and Black ecologies, this paper shows how attention to materiality might offer novel modes of theorizing and enacting anti-caste political ecologies.

Presentation long abstract

 This paper explores the materiality of water through the lens of caste. It focuses on the imaginaries and practices of agriculturalists in rural central India as they navigate the complex materiality of subsurface aquifers. For cultivators in semi-arid regions, irrigation is a matter of grave concern, opening up novel agricultural possibilities - new crops, multiple crop cycles, and higher profits. Yet, access to groundwater is elusive, leading farmers to call on spirits, gods, astrologers, and hydrogeologists in their quest. For Dalit (oppressed caste) cultivators, however, the unknowability of the subsurface and the uncertainty around locating groundwater offers an avenue for the critical reimagination and contestation of caste hierarchies. While surface access to land reflects and reproduces structural inequalities of class and caste, the unpredictability of the subsurface can potentially unsettle these hierarchies. I suggest that the matter and meaning of water acquires new significance through the experiences of Dalit smallholder farmers. Drawing on ethnographic research and building on scholarship in Dalit and Black ecologies, this paper shows how attention to materiality might offer novel modes of theorizing and enacting anti-caste political ecologies.

Presentation short abstract

Both scientists and Indigenous practitioners engage with oceanic agency that exceeds control, yet frame these encounters differently. If scientists acknowledged co-production with oceanic assemblages rather than extraction from passive matter, they might traverse ontological distance.

Presentation long abstract

Political ecology scholarship on water's materiality has largely theorised from minority world perspectives, positioning the majority world as testing ground for Northern concepts. This paper offers theory emerging from South African oceanic contexts, examining how marine scientists and Indigenous knowledge holders both work with oceanic forces that exceed human control, yet recognise and articulate these encounters fundamentally differently.

Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in South Africa, I demonstrate how oceanic materiality actively participates in knowledge production across distinct epistemological frameworks. Scientists encounter oceanic agency through instrument breakdowns, model failures, and algorithmic limitations - moments when the sea refuses to cooperate with research protocols. Yet they typically frame these encounters as technical problems, maintaining a subject-object binary that positions oceans as passive matter. Indigenous practitioners, by contrast, explicitly recognize the ocean as kin, neighbour, or ancestor whose agency shapes human life and obligation. Knowledge emerges through sustained relations rather than extraction.

Building on Barad's intra-activity and Indigenous relational ontologies, I propose oceanic intra-activity as a concept emerging from majority world contexts that challenges Northern framings of water's materiality. This shared experience of working with oceanic forces offers potential grounds for epistemic engagement across ontological boundaries. If scientists acknowledged their practice as co-production with oceanic assemblages, they might traverse ontological distance toward Indigenous frameworks that centre relationality.

This paper contributes to (re)materializing political ecology by theorising from Southern perspectives on how oceanic materiality might enable reimagining relations between multiple ways of knowing in contexts marked by colonial hierarchies.

Presentation short abstract

What can we learn from water’s fugitivity and ability to escape capture? How does water’s ‘sintering’ (Simpson, 2025) aid in relational and reciprocal care. Soothing or quenching, flooding or inundating, water speaks, and as Melz Owusu (2023) reminds us, “when we speak to [water], she speaks back”.

Presentation long abstract

Engaging with established majority world approaches to water from both the Global South (Sheik, 2023; Ferdinand, 2019; Alexander, 2005; Glissant, 1997) and North (Simpson, 2025; Gumbs, 2020; Ingersoll, 2016) as a convergence point, we propose to engage with water as a liberatory force that teaches us to learn across differences. With Earth raging from the effects of the triple planetary crisis, what can we learn from water’s planetary consciousness which courses through despite turbulent times?

As two researchers, distinctly positioned across the Global South-Global North divide and both geopolitically located below sea level, with the privilege inherited from the Dutch colonial empire, we embrace water as an ancient ancestor. It is through water as mediator with other dimensions (sensory, metaphysical, spiritually, quantum), that we share and reinvigorate personal stories, collective meditations, interspecies memories, healing rituals and speculative fabulations.

These often neglected aspects of the political ecology of water are the currents which animate our politics of refusal rooted in a commitment to communal life-affirming practices. This lecture performance invites researchers to transgress disciplinary boundaries as a necessary first step towards rejecting the violence of water as natural resource and refusing the nature/water-human divide. Through artistic and embodied practices of collectively theorising with water we critically engage with the question ‘whose knowledge counts’ in more-than-humaworldings.

Presentation short abstract

We focus on diverse worlds around rainwater built through resistance and care practiced by Indigenous and artisanal communities. We trace community struggles for survival and flourishing so that colonially damaged materialities of rainwater may (re)gain their place as cornerstones of sustainability.

Presentation long abstract

“When will we again see a spring of unstained green?

After how many monsoons will the blood be washed from the branches?”

Faiz Ahmed Faiz (1974, trans. Aga Shahid Ali)

Political ecologists have developed many concepts to scrutinise the materiality of violence including structural and slow violence, violent environments, and violent transitions. However, such concepts are limited in capturing the cumulative impact of extreme violence of colonial genocides of the last five centuries. More expansive concepts such as racial capitalism and settler colonialism, often neglect how extreme violence constitutes distinctive socio-ecological materialities of the modern world. To highlight those materialities, we use the concept of colonial modernity developed by postcolonial and decolonial scholars to describe material cultures enacted through European colonialisms in the Majority world.

Colonial modernity is globally hegemonic today. It has been built and extended through the devastation of culture-natures or worlds that constitute diverse Indigenous and artisanal ways of being, knowing and making that have been thus curtailed beyond recognition. Focusing on specific rain worlds and associated ways of being-knowing-making with rainwater, we trace their devastation by the growth of the modern world in two regions: Palestine and South India. Our main aim, however, is to go beyond colonial devastation and provide an overview of what survives or thrives in diverse rain worlds through resistance, endurance and care practiced by affected communities. It is through extensive struggles for survival and flourishing that colonially damaged materialities of rainwater may (re)gain their place as cornerstones of decolonial sustainability.

Presentation short abstract

By nurturing a conversation between political ecology of water with philosophy of science, and literature, I illustrate how recognising water as a constellation of matter, and not as one "physical thing”, allows for a deeper engagement with its material politics in the majority world.

Presentation long abstract

The very question “what is water” (Linton, 2010) continues to shape research into its ontological politics. The progression towards a plural understanding of water, from a technoscientific and depoliticized H20 to hydrosocial water(s), is a major development in critical social sciences. Yet, the dominant conceptualisation continues to frame water as a singular entity – “a physical thing” (Bakker, 2004:49) – and its materiality expressed through the effects produced from the social entanglement with waters flows and fluxes.

I interrogate questions of materiality of water in the majority world by nurturing a conversation between political ecology of water with philosophy of science, and literature. Borrowing from Hasok Chang’s “epistemic pluralism” (2012) which unsettles the scientific consensus around stability of H20 through historiographical interrogation, and Sukumar Ray’s (1920) imaginative use of plural waters in his short play, Abak Jalpan ( A Strange Drink of Water), as a critique of colonial middle class society, I argue for a constitutive materiality of water, where recognising water as a constellation of matter, and not as one “physical thing”, allows for a deeper engagement with its material politics in the majority world. I empirically illustrate this point by exploring the debate on Total Dissolved Solids (TDS) in drinking water quality in urban India where water is defined by the desire for specific matter and how technologies to produce such outcomes animates wider politics of urban water governance.

Presentation short abstract

Community-led springshed restoration in the Indian Himalayas reveals water as an active socio-ecological force. Building on Indigenous, traditional knowledge, hydrogeology, and lived experiences, this presentation reframes water’s materiality through majority-world practice.

Presentation long abstract

Springs in the Indian Himalayas offer a compelling scope to (re)materialize the political ecology of water from a majority-world standpoint. Far from being passive “sources,” Himalayan springs shape social organization, ecological resilience and governance practices through their dynamic materiality. Drawing on practitioner experience from a large-scale Springshed Management initiative, this presentation foregrounds how water’s behavior—its seasonality, recharge sensitivity, and embodied flows—actively structures community decisions, efforts, and collective environmental action.

The work integrates hydrogeological mapping with the traditional knowledge, emphasizing how local customs & philosophies perceive springs as living entities that reciprocally sustain forests, livelihoods and social relations. This cosmovision places water not merely within the realm of scarcity or resource management but within a relational ethics that guides restoration practices. Community-led interventions, including forest regeneration and aquifer recharge, reveal how water’s material agency becomes legible through lived experience and situated knowledges, challenging dominant minority-world theoretical frames.

The initiative’s outcomes—enhanced spring discharge, livelihood benefits and new village-level institutions—show how water’s materiality participates in remaking socio-ecological futures. By placing practitioners insights at the core, majority-world conceptual frameworks and the entanglement of water, landscape and community, the presentation argues for a political ecology attentive to relational materiality and grounded praxis. It invites methodological and conceptual rethinking by allowing water to “speak” through the multiple worlds it inhabits.

Presentation short abstract

This paper examines an Indigenous-led Rights of Nature tribunal as a space where water’s materiality is voiced through relational and plural knowledges, showing how community testimony reshapes justice and rights and challenges extractive, colonial understandings of water.

Presentation long abstract

This paper examines the 2024 Yesah Tribunal—the world’s first Indigenous-led tribunal on the Rights of Nature—as a site where water’s materiality was articulated through plural and relational epistemologies. Convened by an Occaneechi environmental action organization in North Carolina, the Tribunal brought together Indigenous and non-Indigenous community members, activists, scholars, and spiritual leaders to testify against a destructive natural gas pipeline and to speak on behalf of rivers and their natural communities.

Held near the headwaters of the Haw River in North Carolina, the tribunal drew upon diverse lived experiences and worldviews of participants, who reframed water and nature not as passive objects but as subjects with rights and agency that are deeply intertwined with human systems, histories, and wellbeing. In this sense, the Tribunal was a space that allowed water’s materiality to “speak” through those in relationship with it.

Using Constructivist Grounded Theory, this research analyzes how participants narrate their encounters with extractive industry and the meanings they attribute to concepts such as justice, rights, value, and responsibility. This meaning-making emerges through multiple ways of knowing—lived experience, prophecy, emotion, traditional ecological knowledge, and empirical evidence—challenging colonial paradigms of expertise and objectivity and elevating majority-world frameworks.

By foregrounding Indigenous and local epistemologies from the U.S. South, this study traces how Rights of Nature discourse is reshaped through lived experience. These perspectives illuminate relational understandings of water that contest extractive, colonial frameworks and point toward more grounded and justice-oriented ways of engaging with the socionatural world.