Critical Water Geographies: From Histories to Affect

Abstract

Water resource geography has undergone a considerable transformation since its original moorings in engineering and the pure sciences. As this Special Issue demonstrates, many intellectual and practical gains are being made through a politicized practice of water scholarship. This work by geographers integrates a critical social scientific perspective on agency, power relations, method and most importantly the affective/emotional aspects of water with profound familiarity and expertise across sub-disciplines and regions. Here, the ‘critical’ aspects of water resource geography imply anti-positivist epistemologies pressed into the service of contributing to social justice and liberation from water-related political and material struggles. The five papers making up this Special Issue address these substantive and theoretical concerns across South and West Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa and North America.

Mapping the landscape of water and society research: Promising combinations of compatible and complementary disciplines

“…This distinction broadly separates the sciences that seek to test theoretical hypotheses (SH, PG, EC, LS) from the engineering and policy fields that seek to address specific management problems, whether through system optimization (HM) or institutional design (IN). Rather than fixing a specific water management problem, Critical Geography (CG) scholars use a commitment to social justice, unsettling oppressive power structures, and the promotion of transformative social change as starting points to critique the way water management problems are framed in the first place (Blomley, 2006; Mustafa & Halvorson, 2020; Painter, 2000). These approaches, which we refer to as critical , are also distinguished by their epistemological view: they hold that the researcher is an integral part of the system that he/she is studying, so the knowledge that they gather is situated and what they perceive as the optimal solution to the problem, or indeed their very framing of the problem itself, can be subjective and therefore critiqued (see Wesselink et al, 2017).…”

Mapping the Landscape of Water and Society Research: Promising Combinations of Compatible and Complementary Disciplines

“…This distinction broadly separates the sciences that seek to test theoretical hypotheses (SH, PG, EC, LS) from the engineering and policy fields that seek to address specific management problems, whether through system optimization (HM) or institutional design (IN). Rather than fixing a specific water management problem, Critical Geography (CG) scholars use a commitment to social justice, unsettling oppressive power structures and the promotion of transformative social change as starting points to critique the way water management problems are framed in the first place (Blomley 2006;Painter 2000;Mustafa and Halvorson 2020). These approaches, which we refer to as critical, are also distinguished by their epistemological view: they hold that the researcher is an integral part of the system that he/she is studying, so the knowledge that they gather is situated and what they perceive as the optimal solution to the problem, or indeed their very framing of the problem itself, can be subjective and therefore critiqued (see Wesselink, Kooy, and Warner 2017).…”

Hydro-heritage for healing? Examining the gendered experience of water in post-conflict Swat, Pakistan

“…see Gaile & Wilmott, 2004; Sultana & Loftus, 2020). Others, however, have pointed to the cultural meaning (Linton, 2010), emotional and affective aspects (Mustafa & Halvorson, 2020) and the experience (Wescoat, 2021) of water. Our concern in this paper is to understand how water bodies, such as springs, when engaged with through an affectual heritage lens, open up avenues for exploring sense of place, geographical scale from local to national, and gender roles in the post-conflict environment of Swat valley in Northern Pakistan.…”