Lively water infrastructure: Constructed wetlands in more-than-human waterscapes

Abstract

Water infrastructures are often living infrastructures, whose operation relies on processes involving other-than-human living beings. This article considers the materiality of waterscapes by attending to this liveliness. We argue that critical water research can benefit from situating social relations and water transformations within more-than-human worlds. Our conceptual framework brings hydrosocial scholarship into conversation with more-than-human geography. This opens avenues for interdisciplinary water research that weaves together ecology and qualitative social research. The analytical potential of such a framework is explored through an empirical account grounded in two constructed wetland projects in rural India. These infrastructural assemblages engage humans, other living beings and objects in webs of material-semiotic processes. We present three stories of intra-action that focus on particular plants, microbes and animals within these waterscapes. Our analysis highlights the crucial importance of other-than-human living beings in the production of waterscape knowledge and suggests a need to go beyond the problematisation of ‘uneven’ waterscapes. Approaching waterscapes as more-than-human collectives prompts us to consider the power relations that underpin waterscape knowledge and the politics of multispecies justice. A focus on more-than-human infrastructures opens up the possibility of interdisciplinary water research that is better attuned to the hybrid nature of social and ecological processes, as well as the politics embedded therein.

Hydrosocial geographies: Cycles, spaces and spheres of concern

“…Liao (2023) develops the notion of hydrosocial life to examine how more-than-human relations in shrimp aquaculture are co-produced by Vietnamese and Taiwanese laboratory scientists for biosecurity on farms. Hurst et al (2022) highlight how more-than-human life, such as microbes, plants and animals, form a part of water infrastructure as they examine knowledge claims in wetland projects and wastewater treatment in rural India. More-than-human relations also matter for queer ecology, as Hazard (2022) argues for in a conception of the 'watershed body' that relationally situates ecological sciences for work with Indigenous peoples, and species such as salmon and beaver, to transfigure riverine relations.…”

“…There are overlaps too. Waterscapes are used to explore injustices, such as uneven water access in urban environments (Loftus 2007(Loftus , 2008Kooy 2014;Goh 2019), vulnerability and rural livelihoods in wetlands (King et al 2019;Hurst et al 2022). Drawing on the case of Seine and the Rhône Rivers in France, Bouleau (2014) treats waterscapes as a snapshot of the hydrosocial cycle, identifying how observers mobilize professional practices to define and manage water quantity and quality at different scales.…”

Shrimp in labs: Biosecurity and hydro-social life

“…Shrimp economies rely on water, yet more-than-human relations to water within laboratories are not often prioritised in research. Hydro-social research often foregrounds more-than-human relations among microbes, larvae, plants, people and animals in rivers, lakes, seas and cities (Acevedo-Guerrero, 2022; Helmreich, 2011; Hurst et al, 2022; Woelfle Hazard, 2022). Aquaculture, however, is an industry that requires the meticulous management of more-than-human relations in watery environments which present biosecurity concerns that require response both in terms of farming practices and scientific interventions in labs.…”

“…The clerks generally have no background or specific training in aquaculture, but rather learned on the job to conduct simplified and standardised tests for water salinity, pH value, ammonia, nitrogen dioxide and other chemical elements. Clerks also analyse the content of good and bad algae, such as Pyrrophyta , Euglenophyta , Cyanophyte , Chlorophyceae and Thalassiosira , which provide critical indexes for water quality (Hurst et al, 2022). With these reports, clerks compared water quality against a normal standard to provide farmers with suggestions as to how to best adjust their pond management practices.…”

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

“…This challenge has been particularly salient for disciplines whose perspectives on CHWS are the most complementary and prone to provide the most transformative insights. For example, a few exceptions notwithstanding (e.g., Rusca et al, 2017; Savelli et al, 2021), interdisciplinary research combining the physical environmental sciences and the critical social sciences is rare; and yet viewing water as both an environmental process and a socio‐cultural vector can unveil crucial new insights, for example on the social justice implications on water security crises, and more recently on more‐than‐human (waste)water, soil and sediments waterscapes (de Micheaux et al, 2018; Hurst et al, 2022; McClintock, 2015; Rusca et al, 2022). This tension between compatibility and complementarity, and the general barriers and requirements for interdisciplinary research, have been insightfully discussed elsewhere (e.g., Lélé & Norgaard, 2005; Oughton & Bracken, 2009; Rusca & Di Baldassarre, 2019; Wesselink et al, 2017).…”