With prayer of circulation, 
(deadline approaching...)
All my best, 
Luisa

Call for Papers

American Anthropological Association Annual Meeting

Denver, CO, November 18-22, 2015

Paper Session



The land-water nexus:

Hybrid landscapes, fluid boundaries, and amphibious livelihoods



Organizers:

Alejandro Camargo (Syracuse University)


Luisa Cortesi (Yale University)


Land and water provide habitat, energy, and the material stratum for the reproduction of life and labor, and as such they embed and reflect many fundamental values, contradictions, and tensions of society. Contemporary processes of global resource grabs, the intensification of climate change and extreme weather events, and the expansion of large-scale infrastructures have reasserted that land and water are also conduits for the reproduction of capital, the privatization of nature, and the escalation of struggles for justice and rights. These processes have stimulated a growing body of literature which has positioned land and water at the center of intense academic and political debates. Despite the diversity, scope, and interdisciplinarity of these debates, however, little attention has been paid to the complex ways in which land and water connect, are interdependent and mutually constitutive. In many places land and water constitute a single entity, a hybrid reality through which livelihoods, cosmologies, and systems of knowledge unfold. Some environments such as deltas, floodplains, intermittent waterways, and coastal sediment habitats overthrow the boundaries of land and water, and pose serious challenges to the way in which we understand these two elements.  Presenters are invited to critically discuss what can be tentatively called the land-water nexus, both theoretically and from specific case studies. We seek ethnographic reflections that question and put under scrutiny the land/water boundaries, and that contribute to broader reflections on hybrid environments (Lahiri-Dutt 2014), nature-society interconnectedness (Castree and Braun 2001), and amphibious livelihoods and spaces (Fals Borda 1979; Morita 2014; ten Bos 2009).

Possible topics include: 

Water within the land: Understandings of groundwater and hydrogeology.
Land that sucks water: Desert and oasis. 
Water used as land and instead of land: Aquaculture and similar.
Living on water: Boaters, floodplain and stilt house dwellers.
Separating/merging land and water for development: Dams, flood control, generated inundation, artificial waterways.
Issues of ownership on water-land hybrid landscapes.
Land born of water: fluvial lands, river deltas, sedimented waters, and recurrently inundated floodplains.
Land and water overlappings: temporary waterways and islands, marshes, wetlands, and waterlogging.
Water for land: Wetting of the soil and floodplain fertility.
Land and water topography.
Land and water cosmologies, tradition, knowledges.


Please send abstracts of around 500 words to [log in to unmask] and [log in to unmask] by Friday, April 10, or ASAP! 



References:



Castree, N., & Braun, B. (2001). Social nature: Theory, practice, and politics. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell Publishers.

Fals Borda, O. (1979). Historia Doble de la Costa: Mompox y Loba (Vol. 1). Bogotá: Carlos Valencia Editores.

Lahiri-Dutt, K. (2014). Beyond the water-land binary in geography: Water/lands of Bengal re-visioning hybridity. Acme, 13(3), 505-529. 
Morita, A. (2014). Infrastructuring the amphibious space: The interplay of aquatic and terrestrial infrastructures in the Chao Phraya Delta in Thailand. Unpublished paper.

ten Bos, R. (2009). Towards an amphibious anthropology: Water and peter sloterdijk. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 27(1), 73-86.


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