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- Convenors:
-
Tanvi Agrawal
(Wageningen University and Research)
Amitangshu Acharya (IHE Delft Institute of Water Education)
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- Location:
- Fundació Enric Miralles, Barcelona
Format/Structure
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.
Accepted papers
Session 1Presentation 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
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
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
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.