Intersectionality and water: how social relations intersect with ecological difference

Social geography I: Intersectionality

“…Bastia (2014) provides an excellent overview of the import that intersectionality has in debates about migration and development (see also Bastia et al, 2011) and intersectionality has also been employed in research focusing on issues relating to water, nature and ecology (e.g. Nightingale, 2011;Thompson, 2016). More recently, Gökariksel and Smith (2017) provide an insightful justification for the need for intersectional feminism in the era of Trumpism.…”

Rethinking water insecurity, inequality and infrastructure through an embodied urban political ecology

“…This work collectively brings attention to how water in/security and inequality is intimately tied to overlapping (gender, class, caste, and race) power relations that shape differing forms and levels of water precariousness and hardships for residents who share the same neighborhoods, lanes, and even households. This work illuminates the need for approaches to water insecurity to further pinpoint how water's materiality (see also Thompson, 2016), diverse infrastructures and everyday governance interact with social hierarchies to produce unequal socio-environments. Furthermore, an intersectional approach reveals how particular gender/class/race/ethno-religious groups' situated knowledge of the waterscape may have emancipatory potential for producing more equitable water (Loftus, 2006).…”

“…To fill this lacuna, feminist political ecology focuses attention to the bodily scale of water-related inequalities, demonstrating how wider political, discursive, and material factors that co-produce urban water are situated and unevenly embodied. This work gives attention to unequal power relations in shaping the ways water is unevenly governed and experienced along intersecting gender/class/race lines, consequently producing intra-household dimensions of water inequity and insecurity (Truelove, 2011;O'Reilly, 2006;O'Reilly & Dreibelbis, 2018;Sultana, 2011;Thompson, 2016). In an effort to bridge such feminist and situated approaches within the canon of urban political ecology, Doshi calls for scholars to "embody" UPE by "connecting socio-natures of…resource distribution with the intimate, meaningful and power-laden embodiments of such flows among differently situated groups" (Doshi, 2017, p. 126).…”

“…Intersectionality is a concept-analytic that stems from black, multicultural and postcolonial feminist scholarship that gives attention to the ways gender operates in conjunction with race, class, and other power structures in shaping social relations and everyday experiences of inequality (Crenshaw, 1989). Taken up in a growing number of gender and water studies and feminist political ecology more broadly (Truelove, in press;Harris, 2009;Mollett & Faria, 2013;O'Reilly, 2006;Sultana, 2011 ;Thompson, 2016;Zwarteveen, Ahmed, & Gautam, 2014), analyses of intersectionality in relation to water illuminate how gender/class/race and other power geometries emerge in conjunction with the socio-natural transformation of the urban waterscape. These studies thus demonstrate how intersectional power relations, subjectivities and social differentiation develop in relation to water and its urban infrastructures.…”

Children and young people living through the monsoon: watery entanglements and fluid inequalities

“…Our theorisation of watery entanglements is informed by two core bodies of scholarship; first, that of vital materialities (Barad 2007;Bennett 2010) in paying attention to the power of non-human others in the weathering world (Rooney 2019). Second, we draw on the work of feminist political ecologists Truelove (2011), Sultana (2013) and Thompson (2016) to attend to the embodied experiences of water. Whilst we do not frame our argument specifically around gender as an intersectional theme to understand watery relations, we respond to the feminist call for inquiring into the micro politics of the everyday and the body (Sultana 2013) by unpacking the lived, embodied and emotional experiences of the monsoon.…”