Part I: Agency of Water

The recent upsurge in research on the political, social and aesthetic life of water no doubt owes its impetus to maritime, climate change, Anthropocene and feminist studies (Steinberg and Peters, Neimanis, deLoughrey, Blum, Chen and others). Critics have looked into the environmental, (post)colonial, geographic, political and cultural significance and use of water across some very specific contexts (e.g. the Arctic, the Indian Ocean, film, literature, capitalism, water management, urban spaces, maritime crossings), engaging both its reality and representation. The former has been addressed by, among others, Hawkins et al., Anand, Neimanis and Helmreich. The latter has drawn critics such as Yates, Anidjar, Cohen, Mentz, Neimanis and Protevi, to name just a few. Philosophical discourses, on the other hand, have drawn on what water resists, enables and connotes and the values thus generated: its mobile and liquid and life-giving nature. Gaston Bachelard probes into the imaginary textures of matter via literary representations of water. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari have resorted to the physical properties of water to theorize what they call the smooth space. Michel Serres focuses on the acoustic life of the sea to talk about noise as the other of order and regulation. For (Freud's) psychoanalysis, the oceanic is "the unconscious of the unconscious" (Rooney). A very recent special issue of ELN inaugurates hydro-criticism, a term which marks novel interventions in the field of maritime studies and beyond. This special issue aims to further expand the existing research on the material, political and affective states of water as well as to enable novel waves and ways of thinking with and through water. Moving beyond the somewhat over-researched concepts of fluidity and flows, we aim to shift critical inquiry towards perspectives that balance between the scientific, the social, the (bio-)political and the cultural. We particularly welcome theorizations that foreground water's material constitution (with its singular physico-chemical properties) as well as its relational potential, such as its interactions with substances, forces, bodies and shapes, as well as with itself. We are particularly interested in (the consequences of):  water's ability to wet,

To say that water is crucial to life is axiomatic. It pervades daily life, manifests itself in a variety of spaces and forms, and is used in a multitude of ways. It also pervades geography's history as an academic discipline, whether through studies of hydrological processes, examinations of resource distribution, or conceptualisations of nature ^ culture relationships. Water's place in such theorising is not limited to recent explorations in political ecology and hybridity but extends back to Semple's 1911 account of water's ``role in shaping the history of specific societies'' (Ekers and Loftus, 2008, page 699). Geographers' engagement with water is diverse and disparate. Our aim in developing this theme issue is to showcase a diversity of ontological and epistemological approaches to understanding and examining water, bringing them together to highlight some of the directions future research on human ^water relations might take.

How can we begin to think with water and like the watery bodies we are? This challenge is posed by the writers, artists and researchers whose works are collected in Thinking with Water. The book stages a necessary intervention in cultural and political thought, exploring the premise that water can provide not an abstract model for, but a material example of, a relational ethics attentive to the co-constitutive and interdependent nature of the human and the more-than-human. The resulting collection is a richly interconnected, interdisciplinary account of how diverse human cultures have valued and devalued, and lived with and against, the bodies of water that surround, course through and sustain them.

Annual Review of Anthropology, 2019

The anthropology of water is a self-declared relational field that attempts to transcend nature/culture distinctions by attending to the fact that the social and ecological aspects of water are separated only by convention. Despite its recent coming of age, the anthropology of water is incredibly expansive. It attends to molecular, embodied, ecosystemic, and planetary issues. I provide an overview of that breadth in four thematic clusters: (in)sufficiency, bodies and beings, knowledge, and ownership. These clusters highlight issues of materiality, ontological politics, and political economy. They are the grounds on which questions of water justice are elucidated. Furthermore, I show how water is always more than itself; its force and material presence constantly frame people's efforts to address the fundamental question of what it means to live life collectively in a world that is always more than human. I close with two directions for research: the denaturalization of water's materiality and the diversification of the moral undertones of our analytic vocabularies.

The Goose, 2015

Water, Creativity and Meaning: Multidisciplinary Understandings of Human-Water Relationships, 2018

In our introduction, we meandered through intersecting literatures, providing routes to current thinking about human–water relations, from deep ecology and ecofeminism, to anthropological and urban geographical accounts of modern water systems, from philosophical accounts of the more-­than-­human and bioethical, to accounts that seek to bring spiritual, poetic, sensory and aesthetic dimensions creatively to life. These influences are found across this collection. With a specific focus on creative approaches and arts practices, the authors draw out the potential of creativity to inform these different literatures. As greater than the sum of its parts, we wish to elaborate on the central contributions of the collection as a whole, thinking about how it speaks back to current water research and to point towards future avenues of research and collaboration. Specifically, we hope that this work contributes towards the development of a creative water ethics. We begin by articulating how the the collection responds to a call for starting from a fundamentally different analytical (and even, subject) position in order to do research on human–water relations. The contributors forward alternate ways of knowing through changing the subject/object relationship of knowledge-­making, incorporating 'others' into it via creative processes and by using arts and creativity to make visible alternate relations with water. Second, we consider how the volume represents an attempt to bring other 'voices' to the fore that would not ordinarily be a part of water resources policy or management, through adopting a number of creative 'tactics' and relations with watery others. We then illustrate how 'agency' has been central to many of the chapters and how creative approaches can expand the meanings of agency in productive ways. Finally, we rehearse some potential pitfalls of creative approaches and share learnings from practitioners and academics in this collection, also thinking about where these experimental 'tributaries' might meander next. Process, plurality and making visible alternative spaces The first thing that is clear is that projects with creative and participatory elements are helping to foster different human–water relationships through incorporating lay/local/plural knowledge(s) into water governance, and through cultivating an 'ethic of care' by paying special attention to watery places, practices and habitats. They draw attention to encounters with water outside of the hydrosocial contract which creates identities of 'water providers' and 'water consumers' and outside modern water's instrumental language of 'resources', 'systems' and 'services'. Exchanges happen in these different types of encounters with water that help to reinforce new sensibilities, and a 'trace' of such encounters filters into everyday practice as a latent form of knowledge that can be drawn on. Creative practices can enable encounters that can be effective in reflection and learning processes, having the capacity to 'spur ideational change and those who have the capability to invoke that change' as suggested by Farnum et al. in Chapter 8. Creative methods can also consolidate new ideas or sensibilities, born out of social exchange, and communicate them to a wider sphere, drawing creativity out of others and 'giving voice' to them, as illustrated for example by Leeson in relation to the Geezers on the Thames (Chapter 1), and Bakewell et al.

Springer eBooks, 2023

All names of people and dwelling places are pseudonymised, names of rivers and infrastructure are not changed.

KLIMA #5: Liquid Futures, 2022

When Klima first reached out to Qanat, to invite the collective to contribute to the issue you’re currently reading, I spent some time thinking what new forms of collaborative writing we could propose. I had just found, in my archives, a first draft for a zine that was never brought to completion; a proposal for a small publication I had started assembling in 2017, following up the emergence of Qanat’s very first iteration. Back then the project took the shape of a residency followed by an exhibition, which was nourished, in parallel, by a public program hosted by the cultural space Le 18 in Marrakech which involved artists, architects, geographers, ethnobotanists, and activists, all of whom came from or were committed to various Moroccan watery landscapes. This manuscript that had sat in my laptop for more than five years was like an early manifestation of an instance of a project, uttered without any presupposition that it could become what it is today: a collective body of contributors, a rhizome of various inquiry lines, an infrastructure of like-minded people thinking from and operating not only in Marrakech, but increasingly within other geographies. Yet, when browsing through it, I realized how many seeds of the current conversations and names of long-lasting contributors that first project already contained. And so I thought: why not offer a glimpse of that first space-time? Why not exhume a Qanat before Qanat, an early project which opened up many more questions, as well as unfolding friendships, complicities, shared understandings, and collective possibilities? What you will navigate through in the following pages is a summarized version of a collection of texts and conversations I had, primarily, with the seven artists invited to contribute to the first Qanat exhibition Between Wells as part of the broader program Qanat: on the Politics and Poetics of Water, namely Oli Bonzanigo, M’barek Bouhchichi, Abdellah Hassak, Jérôme Giller, Shayma Nader & Nadir Bouhmouch, and Heidi Vogels.

Anthropological Notebooks, 2019

This paper explores the materialities, (im)mobilities and meanings of dwelling on and with water by asking how is water experienced, narrated, and understood. Water's physical qualities both afford mobility and create frictions, thus complicating the boundaries between moving and staying, while waterscapes are also full of political, socio-cultural , and metaphorical meanings. Dwelling on water presents a challenge to overwhelmingly sedentary states and their terra-centric logics, which compels us to further discuss water both in a phenomenological and a political manner. This special issue suggests avenues for studying dwelling on and with water by examining various practices of being on water with their related meanings (the liveaboard boating communities on inland waterways and surfers on the sea) as well as with(out) water in terms of water scarcity, thus underlining the need for an anthropology of water.

zenodo.org, 2024

Hebraic Analysis of Luke 4:38-44