Presentation short abstract

Modernist-capitalist imaginaries and cartographies re-order rivers as extraction sites. New water justice movements arise to defend river commons. Bridging them translocally, Riverhood’s framework and countermapping endeavors engage with these struggles to contest grabbing and misrepresentation

Presentation long abstract

Mega-damming, pollution and depletion endanger rivers worldwide. Meanwhile, modernist imaginaries of ordering ‘unruly waters and humans’ have become cornerstones of hydrocratic and market-driven development. They frame the hydro/social as capitalist techno-political cyborg natures, sidelining river-commons cultures and deepening socio-environmental injustices. The corresponding cartographic governance techniques re-present rivers’ nature and society as extraction sites, legitimizing the grabbing and degeneration of peasant-, indigenous- and fishing-commons’ territories. But myriad new water justice movements proliferate: rooted, transdisciplinary, multi-scalar coalitions that deploy alternative river–society ontologies, bridge South–North divides, and translate river-enlivening practices from local to global and vice-versa.

In the presentation, I first present a collective framework that conceptualizes ‘riverhood’ to engage with these movements and commoning initiatives. It suggests four interrelated ontologies: ‘river-as-ecosociety’, ‘river-as-territory’, ‘river-as-subject’, and ‘river-as-movement’. Second, I examine the Traveling Rivers initiative, linking grassroots artist-activism, engaged academia and river commoning struggles through counter-mapping. Bridging six river conflict-arenas in Colombia and Ecuador, local knowledges, strategies and struggles converse and cross-pollinate across contexts, invigorating ‘living with the river’ proposals and forging river-defense networks. Grassroots counter-mapping among socio-fluvial struggles may mobilize new concepts and strategies to contest river grabbing and misrepresentation, strengthening ‘rivers of resistance’ that break away from imposed status quo river governance.