Format/Structure

We propose a panel with presentations followed by a brief round of questions, ending with an open format discussion.

Long Abstract

The question of materiality in political ecology has witnessed intense debates in relation with water, often seen as an object of politics, but also recognised as having (shared) agency: water’s materiality animates social outcomes in dynamic interaction with human and non-human actors, situating it within the socionatural realm. Further, water is not singular but varies by physical state and associations, and discursive and epistemological constructions. This multiplicity renders it inherently slippery, susceptible to varied meanings and appropriations. It also brings normative, epistemological and methodological conundrums on ‘whose knowledge counts’ and ‘where to see from’, to be navigated for meaningful and rigorous research. Scholarship on the materiality of water in political ecology has largely built on Marxist and postmodern theories. The majority world has largely been a testing ground for theories on materiality from the minority world, reducing it to a site of enquiry for the latter.

(Re)materialising is a call to theorise water from majority world lenses. This panel is therefore a provocation to (re)engage with questions and concerns around the materiality of water, anchoring the discourse on ideas, concepts, theories, methods and experiences from the majority world. We invite contributions that interrogate materiality in the political ecology of water through conceptual and methodological experimentation, Indigenous cosmovisions, and through vocabularies emerging from lived experiences, drawing on diverse scholarship. We encourage creative, interdisciplinary, and transdisciplinary approaches engaging with the multiple relationalities in which water participates, and which allow its materiality to ‘speak’. Through the panel, we hope to contribute to a (re)materialisation of Political Ecology, through studies of water’s ever-shifting forms, meanings, and effects.

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