Speakers and abstracts

Over the past two decades, Erik Swyngedouw has published several books and over a hundred research papers in leading journals in the broader fields of political economy, political ecology, and urban theory and culture. His research programme is built around two main theoretical perspectives and articulated through two empirical windows. The first research programme focuses on geographical political economy, with special attention to transformations in the capitalist space economy. In particular, the articulation between local/regional and national/transnational processes has been of central importance. Specific research includes industrial restructuring, finance, urban/regional development and governance, and the scalar’ transformation of governance. The second research programme focuses on political-ecology, with particular emphasis on the governance, politics, and economics of water resources. The main theoretical objective here is to fuse theoretically social and physical processes. This aims to contribute to the formulation of a politically progressive socio-natural theory.

Hydrosocial reterritorialisation and smallholder farming under Uzbekistan’s New Green Economy

In recent years, under the pressure of environmental, political, and economic factors, Uzbekistan has embarked on an expansive development agenda under the auspices of the “Green Economy”, actively endorsed by international development organisations. Within the agricultural sector, this entails an overhaul of the former cotton-centered production model in favour of high-value crops and vertically integrated clusters, irrigated using the most up-to-date technologies. Such a process entails a “hydro-social reterritorialisation” of the rural landscape, within which smallholder farmers have traditionally served an essential role as providers of food and cheap labour. What are the implications of the redirection of water flows for Uzbekistan’s smallholder farmers? To what extent does the production of water scarcity pose an existential threat to the reproduction of their livelihoods? This research draws on elite interviews and a comparative case study between two remote areas in Uzbekistan’s Samarkand and Qashkadaryo regions respectively, to interrogate the tension between articulations of “green modernity” and “water efficiency” and the scattered and informal nature of smallholding as the “backbone” of Uzbekistan’s rural life.

Blue Biopolitics at the Baltic Sea: The framework 

The discipline of International Relations (IR) is “sea blind”. It is very land-focused and only recently turned its gaze toward the seas and oceans. While the Baltic Sea is an important marker for regional cooperation and security, the sea and its life receive little attention among IR scholars. The sea is relevant only for connecting or separating states, as it is a source of natural resources and a motivation for cooperation or conflict. This paper will present my framework and some preliminary ideas for its implementation for studying biopolitics in the Baltic Sea based on Michel Foucault’s concepts. From the biopolitical perspective, the sea is full of life, and it is a dynamic, changing space connected to the land and human activities, made known, regulated, governed in many ways, and cared for by different mechanisms and strategies. The biopolitical approach encourages us to develop a relational approach to explore diverse human-nature relations as multiple sea-related, everyday encounters beyond state-centrism and unfolding processes of governmentalizing, disciplining, securitizing, and caring for marine nature. 

Fresh water, colonialism and we as part of it
 
In the 16th century, colonial authorities were transported from Europe to Africa, slaves from Africa to America and production from America to Europe. The global economy was built on this legacy, Western-led and for the benefit of the Global North. This system was promoted by the World Bank Group and the IMF, the UN and the globalisation of the millennium: products made anywhere can be bought anywhere in the world, as long as there is purchasing power. 
 
The production of all products necessarily requires sufficient fresh water, both in terms of quality and quantity. This applies to agricultural, industrial and service products. Domestic and municipal households account for only 12% of the world’s freshwater withdrawal. 
 
The presentation will show how countries economically subordinate to the West are importing products made using local freshwater resources into the global North.  This happens regardless of whether the producing regions are already under freshwater stress or even scarcity. 
 
This use of fresh water for the benefit of the prosperous West is water colonialism and ideologically a continuation of 16th century colonialism.  Every country in the Global North is part of this exploitative system, including Finland

Neoliberal abstraction of water in the global water finance: Notes from the World Water Forum

In this paper, I explore the various shapes and geometries that water ontologically takes (or rather, is taken by) within the global financial streams of neoliberal and marketized governance. Through an analysis of the World Water Forum, I demonstrate how the linear geometries and ontologies of growth promoted by the event abstract water from its finite and circular materiality. While previous literature has criticized events like the World Water Forum for reinforcing the privatization of water, leading to inequalities and endangering vulnerable groups, I aim to further investigate the impact of these mechanisms on water itself. The concept of economic growth is irreconcilable with the finite nature of water, resulting in disastrous effects due to this ontological conflict.

I view the World Water Forum as a temporal and spatial event that brings together diverse actors, discourses, and materialities. It is characterized by a density of relations in a specific place and time, producing, reinforcing, and disseminating particular patterns, shapes, and speeds of water governance across spaces and actors. This density amplifies the hegemonic ontologies of economic growth.

Hydrosemiotic Entanglements

Hydrosemiosisrefers to the sign processes of water – to the watery entanglements that produce meaning. Natural scientists studying watery realms are involved in hydrosemiosis (Baker 2017); e.g, paleohydrology looks at landscapes to interpret the processes of water in the past, water isotope forensics studies the isotopic fingerprints of water to trace its history, and biomonitoring measures human blood and urine for signs of environmental chemicals. Hydrosemiosis is also present in everyday lives, as our watery bodies navigate entanglements with other living and non-living bodies of water (Neimanis 2017). The Guild of Hydrosemiosis is a para-institution that calls upon the movements and memories of bodily, planetary, and speculative waters. Inspired by the ancient practice of Hydromancy (divination by means of water), the Guild practices (dis)located sonic rituals to attune to watery traces carried across different worlds, bodies, and times. The Guild enquires scientific practices of hydrosemiosis but approaches them from the edges that line the techno-scientific centre. Foregrounding hydrosemiosis as a speculative feminist practice, this paper meditates on a) scientific snow meltwater sampling practices in Finnish Lapland and b) the Guild’s “Leakage archive” that shadows/parallels scientific understandings of water’s messages with stories of watery (dis)connection. 

We used to be seaweed

This textile installation reflects the transformation of the Aral Sea and its ecosystems through a speculative lens. The artist modified traditional Kazakh felting techniques, introducing raw silk and cotton produced with water from the rivers that once nourished the Aral Sea. The act of gathering cotton became a way to connect the artist to the memory of her grandmother, who left Uzbekistan for Kazakhstan and never spoke of her childhood spent working in the cotton fields.
The work envisions and zooms in on the barely visible life that once thrived in the sea, imagining micro- and macroalgae, phyto- and zooplankton. This close-up creates a varied texture that invites touch, creating a tactile connection to the lost ecosystems.
The felting process, inherently entangling, mirrors the interconnectedness of ecological and cultural histories. By inviting
interaction through touch and smell, and linking lost ecosystems to cultural practices, the work encourages viewers to engage physically with these ties and to reflect on how cultural traditions can preserve and convey the memory of ecological loss.

Making sense of water as a worldview boundary in Chile, Peru and Colombia 

The significance of water for sustaining life is so paramount, that the ways in which societies are organized for water governance offer an interesting prism to their historically prevailing worldviews and political ideologies, and vice versa. Water itself plays a vital role as a nexus connecting the state and the market; different levels, sectors, and administrative bodies of government; and various cultural and ethnic spheres. This often engenders important philosophical and legal debates taking place at the intersection of different domains of rights encompassing property rights, human rights, and the rights of nature. Our focus is on water-related social and environmental struggles in three South American countries – Chile, Peru and Colombia – each representing distinct approaches to water governance within the framework of a neoliberal state. In these countries, we argue, water lies at the boundary between distinct worldviews involving western and indigenous elements. We explore water governance in relation to human rights, property rights, and the rights of nature, and discuss how water, seen as a worldview boundary, may refract how these rights are seen, what the consequences of this refraction can be, and what could be done differently to improve water governance. 

Extractive infrastructures and violent fluvial volatilities 

In this paper, I explore how the concept of violent fluvial volatilities can help make sense of new temporalities in hydropolitics and how the accelerating infrastructuring of rivers, combined with changing climate, alters hydrosocial relations. By naming certain volatilities as violent, the aim is not only to highlight their brutally detrimental effects but also to attune to questions of responsibility, while acknowledging that not all volatilities are necessarily injurious. The term volatile aims to capture not only the powers of newly erratic water flows but also the new temporalities at stake, which are not effectively grasped by concepts such as slow or catastrophic violence. The concept is developed through empirical studies of two cases in Cambodia. The first focuses on the Mekong tributaries in the Northeast of Cambodia and the effects of ‘hydropeaking’, a mode of operating dams by releasing flow at sudden when electricity demand peaks. The second examines large-scale infrastructure projects on the Mekong tributary of Prek Tnaut where dispossessive property-making through wetland eradiction has provoked floods, now addressed with canal projects that require further evictions. The commonality highlighted in both cases is the forceful attempt to naturalise the generated volatilities by attributing responsibility to climate change. 

Cumulative water impacts and alienation of water in Sodankylä’s “green” mining landscape and hydropower history 

Arctic Finland has become a target for new mining projects legitimized by the green transition and the demand for critical minerals. This puts unprecedented pressure on the region’s waterways, rivers and lakes into which mining effluents are discharged. Through smaller adjacent rivers, most of the wastewater ends up in the large Kemijoki River.  This paper analyzes the situation in the municipality of Sodankylä in Central Lapland, where the process of “water alienation” began with the construction of hydropower plants, artificial lakes, and the damming of the River Kitinen after World War II. Intensified mining adds to the continuum in which local meanings and histories attached to water, such as subsistence fishing or childhood landscapes and reindeer herding pastures, have been severed and altered. In addition, the “green” Sakatti project is planned to be built under the Viiankiaapa mire, with unknown impacts on the wet mire and surrounding groundwater. Based on interviews, the paper discusses the history of water alienation, the cumulative impacts of mining on water, and the local meanings of water in Sodankylä.  I will also show small excerpts from the short film I filmed partly under the surface of the wet mire of Viiankiaapa, bringing to the fore the visuality and pluriversality of water worlds. 

“Water is the enemy of roads.” Road-building in riverine landscape of Papua New Guinea

The Wide Bay area in Pomio District on New Britain Island, Papua New Guinea, is remote rural region. In many ways it is a classic “frontier area”, as it is sparsely populated and marginalized from the political and economic structures of the local province and the country. The large forested region is also eyed by logging and plantation companies as a source of resources. Wide Bay is also since relatively recently connected only tenuously to urban centers by road. Local politicians and locals have sought in various to initiate road projects in the area, and since 2023 Wide Bay is the focus of national road connection project. Wide Bay and Pomio are also filled with rivers, both large and small. The rivers and tropical climate make the landscape particularly dynamic posing major challenges to road and bridge building.
In this paper I examine how road builders, state engineers, overseas consultants and the inhabitants of Wide Bay conceptualize the rivers in various ways as barriers, borders, enemies and living entities, and engage with dynamic and changing landscape of which they are as part as the rivers.

The pluriverse and convivial conservation: Learning from alternative conservation approaches 

Convivial conservation has been advocated as a transformative approach to conservation. It remains, however, underexplored how convivial conservation that promotes the onto-epistemic transformation, i.e., the overcoming of the hegemony of the Euro-modern ontology, a particular way of being and knowing determined by a logic of separation, looks like in practice. Addressing this research gap, this article explores the ontological politics of two alternative conservation initiatives. We adopt a political ontology lens to examine how the Landscape Rewilding Programme in Finland and the initiative for Rights of Ranchería River in Colombia challenge the Euro-modern ontology and contribute to making space for more-than-modern Sámi and Wayúu worlds. Both case studies provide learnings for convivial conservation with regards to promoting the onto-epistemic transformation in terms of transgressing current capitalist institutional boundaries within which the logic of separation is perpetuated, displacing the centrality of the Nature-Culture dualism in conservation, and advancing epistemic justice. They illustrate that to further the onto-epistemic transformation, convivial conservation needs to do justice to the history of the Euro-modern ontology, for example, by breaking with the superiority of scientific knowledge in understanding nature or establishing democratic governance arrangements that facilitate conservation decisions that strengthen the relationship between humans and landscapes. 

Nature-based adaptations; Importance of Indigenous knowledge in water adaptation in coastal zones of global south/ Bangladesh 

Water is not just H2O; it’s also about culture, rituals, practices, and beliefs. The amount of water is not a problem; however, there is acute freshwater scarcity in some parts of the world, e.g., the global south, and coastal zones. Engineering, technological, and structural solutions; water purifying technologies, embankment, and sluice gates are in domination vise-versa local and traditional water practices (canals, ponds) are now side aside. Ponds and canals are the major surface freshwater reservoirs in coastal areas especially in the Sharankhola & Khuriakhlai villages of, Bagerhat, Bangladesh. The natural flow of water is been obstructed, and freshwater availability and accessibility of water are reducing. However, everyone in society is not affected equally e.g., socioeconomic, and cultural groups. For sustainability of water Indigenous perspectives and conservation and restoration of water sources are of importance.   

Lifeworld infrastructure: Injasah water cisterns as infrastructure of Indigenous pastoralism in the occupied West Bank

The year 2024 has witnessed the largest settler-colonial ethnic cleansing of Palestinian communities in the occupied West Bank since its occupation in 1967. Palestinian pastoral communities who live in and are deeply connected to the ecological commons at this settler-colonial frontier have been at the forefront of this assault. These commons are crucial to their survival and cultural identity and include their ancestral grazing lands and water sources. This paper examines the roles and relationships that pastoral communities maintain with water and its role in their anti-colonial struggle. More specifically, we explore stone-hewn water cisterns, locally known as Njasah and the relationalities of care and reciprocity that pastoral communities maintain with these cisterns. Drawing on ethnographic research with communities living in the central West Bank, we argue that Njasah cisterns act as what we call “resistance infrastructure” for pastoral communities in the occupied West Bank against settler colonial control over and erasure of their lifeworlds. 

Fluid artefact? Improvising regimes and sociopolitical relations near water fountains

This paper explores the politics of water-fountains as sociotechnical objects. Widely used worldwide as a main drinking water source, water fountains are multifaceted objects that are constitutive of everyday lives and interactions. Drawing on ethnographic field research near urban water sources in Burkina Faso, Cameroon and Chad, the paper engages with contemporary debates on sciences and technology studies to explore the water-fountain as an object incorporating and shaping power relations between numerous actors: planners, end-users but also maintainers. Ultimately, the paper ponders how an improvised political-ethical regime is likely to (re)work the fountain as an artefact which contests and/or fosters global infrastructural ideals.