74. Living With Water: Ethnographic and Methodological Engagements
Shweta Krishnan, George Washington University; Dana Burton, George Washington University
Posted: February 28, 2022 Accepted Languages: English/Inglés/Inglês, Spanish/Español/Espanhol
There is a moment—a tension—before the flood, the overflow, the snowstorm, the glacier melt when water brims simultaneously with the potential to awe and to harm. This tension augers emergent change, oftentimes unpredictable. Unpredictability—when seen as risk, precarity, crisis, uncertainty—inspires knowledge production practices, technoscientific apparatuses, and geopolitical infrastructures that seek to render water knowable in order to take control of the threat it poses. But water emerges in multi-scalar climatic events and encounters across the world as something always in excess of human control, and urges us to rethink the myth that we can care for ourselves by controlling water. Instead, it urges us to live with its mutable eddies and flows.
This open panel proposes “living with water” as a way of reconfiguring our relations with water’s vitality and volatility. It asks what it means to care for ourselves and for water differently in a damaged world. Care is a method of relationality; caring differently would mean that we eschew epistemologies of unpredictability forged within the furnaces of capitalist and imperialist orders. Instead, we ask what could become possible with a return to the tension in unpredictability—the recognition that water holds alongside harm, the promise of renewal, recuperation, hope, and even joy.
As colonial, capitalist, and climatic processes bring human relations with water into focus, this panel invites papers that ask how to reconcile different engagements with water. How can “living with water” enrich analytical, metaphorical, methodological, pedagogical approaches to unpredictability and emergence?
