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.