CFP RGS-IBG Annual Conference, Exeter 2-4 September 2015

Water in the Anthropocene: creative approaches to understanding and re-thinking human-water relationships*

Organisers: Katherine Jones & Liz Roberts (University of the West of England)

Sponsor: Social and Cultural Geography Research Group (SCGRG)

Water resource depletion, pollution, extreme weather events caused by anthropogenic climate change and water conflicts are some of the most urgent issues facing global society. These challenges often seem technical, even abstract, and couched in policy/scientific language which create distance between humans and water as a natural resource and set of processes and flows. However, humans also have profoundly intimate relationships with water, for example at a bodily level, through sensuous and recreational encounters and through watery senses of place (Anderson and Peters, 2014; Jones, 2014; McEwen et al., 2014). Water, in differing forms, carries imaginative, discursive and symbolic roles in all human lives. Politically and culturally water is everywhere (Linton, 2010).  Our connections with water have profound implications for how we use, misuse, maintain, preserve and conserve water, and how through water we affect other lives human and non-human. Recent research therefore looks to new and creative methods to approach multiple water-related challenges in the Anthropocene (Whatmore, 2013).

This session aims to bring together water scholars and practitioners to explore methods for creatively engaging with water issues and human-water relations. Presentations may include but are  not limited to:

• creative ways of engaging with publics and agencies/organisations
• alternative knowledges and co-production
• creative approaches to presentation (of knowledge/research, e.g. river walks, exhibitions)
• uses of cultural resources (text, image, archive) and methods (stories, encounters, art-science collaboration, digital stories) to think about human-water relations
• materialities of water
• water ecologies
• inter/transdisciplinary approaches to water issues

Please send abstracts (c. 200 words) to Katherine Jones ([log in to unmask]) or Liz Roberts ([log in to unmask]) by Monday 16 February 2015.

*This session is partnered with two other sessions:

Wet Geographies I - Under the Sea: Geographies of the Deep, and

Wet Geographies III - Water-worlds: art practices and wet ecologies. Proceedings will conclude with a panel discussion that will serve to draw out and reflect on themes emerging from across the Wet Geographies discussions.

References

Anderson, J., Peters, K., 2014. Water worlds: human geographies of the ocean. Ashgate Publishing Limimted.

Jones, O., 2014. Is My Flesh Not Public? Thinking of bodies and ³the public² through water. Presented at the New Perspectives on the Problem of the Public, Westminster.

Linton, J., 2010. Introduction, in: What Is Water?: The History of a Modern Abstraction. UBC Press.

McEwen, L., Jones, O., Robertson, I., 2014. ³A glorious time?²Some reflections on flooding in the Somerset Levels. Geogr. J. 180, 326337.

Whatmore, S.J., 2013. Earthly powers and affective environments: An ontological politics of flood risk. Theory Cult. Soc. 0263276413480949.