Presentation short abstract

Climate-resilience claims mask hydrosocial injustice in the Seomjin basin, as displaced communities use collective action to resist continued authoritarian-legacy dam construction. They reclaim the river as a shared hydrosocial territory sustained by connectivity, reciprocity, and living memory.

Presentation long abstract

This paper examines how technocratic water governance reproduces hydrosocial injustice in South Korea’s Seomjin–Yeongsan river system. A proposed reservoir above Juam Dam threatens to displace communities in Sapyeong-myeon while deepening the inter-basin transfer of Seomjin water to the Yeongsan basin. Many community members were previously displaced during authoritarian-era dam expansions of the early 1980s—when rivers across the peninsula were being re-engineered as state-produced, more-than-human waterscapes (Kim, 2019)–a period when political repression made objection nearly impossible. These histories shape present-day interpretations of state-led water governance: as one elder observed of the Yeongsan River, it was “dying then and is dead now,” the result of policy failures and decisions made without informing or involving the people most affected.

Through in-depth interviews with members of the Dongbokcheon Climate Response Dam Countermeasures Committee and local experts, and workshops at the Water Love Learning Center in Hwasun, this study explores how people narrate involvement in the movement, experiences of displacement, and attachments to the waterways sustaining their cultural and ecological worlds, using arts-based methods similar to Korean scholarship with the goal of revitalizing river-based ecological–cultural relations (Choi & Hwang, 2019). Rather than accepting official portrayals of the Seomjin as a “pristine” resource available for extraction, participants situate the river within lived histories of diversion and loss. By foregrounding storytelling, embodied knowledge, and memory, the paper shows how people unsettle technocratic adaptation claims—including those aligned with AI modeling and digital-twin hydrology—and articulate alternative possibilities for justice within heavily engineered waterscapes (Sultana, 2022; Boelens et al., 2016).