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.