In the wake of an unprecedented global environmental crisis, water cycles are disrupted and challenged to a point that puts both humans and nonhumans at risk of survival. However, water is mainly approached as an “object of management” (Barnes 2014) by policy-makers, a resource deprived of its agency and relational depth. Technoscientific discourses of the abstract, “modern” (Linton 2010) water favour anthropocentric epistemologies and obfuscate the power structures that underpin colonial and extractivist schemes (Ross 2024). Academic debates also render visible the violent processes associated with nation-state formation, which have often required “taming water” (Kaika 2005) and the ordering of hydro-social relations through governmental resourcification (Käkonen 2020). The transnational global value chains involved in the commodification of water are another key subject of research inquiry in the context of privatisation, “infrastructural coexistence” (Furlong 2014), and increased profit generated by “plastic waters” (Hawkins, Potter and Race 2015).
Current academic debates in political ecology have highlighted the need for alternative hydro-ontologies (de Wolff and Faletti 2021, Jackson 2018) that fully account for nonhuman-human relations in global water cycles as well as indigenous knowledge at odds with modernist discourses, practices, and policies. Such alternative perspectives take account of water-related flows of humans (e.g., internally displaced people) following water-related disasters but also circulations of non-humans such as waterborne disease or animals. Moreover, water continues to fuel imagination beyond academic endeavors and appears as a central theme in artistic practice that tells new stories for earthy survivals (Haraway 2016).
This two-day symposium held at the University of Tampere aims at exploring new thinkings in hydro-ontologies and hydropolitics. In addition to academics in fields ranging from ecology to political sciences and anthropology, it will welcome practitioners (NGOs) and artists.
Participation:
If you are an academic, artist or activist whose interest fit into the topic and that you wish to participate, please send a 200 word abstract or a short portfolio as well as your affiliation to iuliia.gataulina@tuni.fi and ismael.maazaz@tuni.fi by 15 February. Please also specify if you would need funding support to attend the symposium (travel and accommodation). We will inform participants about the decisions by 21 February.
Organizers:
Dr. Iuliia Gataulina is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Tampere. Her ongoing research, funded by Kone Foundation, analyses different ways of being (with), governing, and exploiting water in the contexts of colonial extractivisms and seeks ways to rethink water from decolonial, relational, and ecological perspectives.
Dr. Ismaël Maazaz is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Tampere. His current project, hosted by the Institute for Advanced Study, focuses on the temporalities, experiences and policies of water scarcity and flooding in Central Africa (Cameroon and Chad).