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.