About

Welcome to the boasblog “Waterworlding”. This blog aims to promote critical debates on diverse understandings of water and analyze its complex interconnections. In recent years, water has increasingly become a social and political issue. When we speak about water, we often taken for granted that we all mean the same thing: water as part of a nature separate from humans. Yet water is not a uniform entity across social contexts. It organizes human life differently in each place and demands vastly different forms of action. This is why this blog aims to introduce and emphasize a more complex understanding of water and to further develop it in a productive way. “Waterworlding” stands for research approaches and discussions engaging with anthropological debates on multiplicity and various ontologies, as well as bringing together empirical cultural studies research on multiple waters and interdisciplinary concepts used to make water tangible. The concept of “waterworlds” and “waterworlding” (Hastrup/Hastrup 2015) serves as the starting point and is expanded to focus on practices, processes, infrastructures, logics, policies, ideas, and materials involved in the creation of complex worlds.

Publishing on “Waterworlding”: We welcome various types of blog posts addressing the complexities, opportunities, and challenges of researching different aspects of water. We invite (multimodal) submissions that present ongoing projects in cultural studies and anthropological water research and beyond as well as submissions that conceptually discuss water as a subject of research, be they current research, field reports (including episodic research vignettes) and reports on conferences, panels, or reviews. Possible formats include image and/or text essays, audio papers, podcasts, data papers, or transcribed interviews and conversations for which the necessary rights have been cleared. Contributions must be no more than 4,000 words and should be aimed at an interdisciplinary audience.

Please send at least one image (with a caption and image rights information) and a short biography (including your ORCID, if available) along with your contribution to the blog’s editors: ina.dietzsch@uni-marburg.de; sabine.eggmann@uzh.ch for the Marburg Water Lab 

This blog is part of the work of the Marburg Water Lab at the Institute of Critical Studies in Culture (EKW) and History at the University of Marburg (UMR). You find us also here.