about the project

Currently, many debates circulate around whether water should be understood as a common public good or a commodified private resource. Much valuable thinking addresses the urgent need to manage water scarcities, to negotiate political and military conflicts over water, to mitigate the impacts of climate change on watersheds, and to contest water’s appropriation, diversion, and contamination. In a largely separate stream of thought, the role that water plays in our mythical and symbolic imaginaries has been richly explored.

The Thinking With Water project

both challenges and complements such studies by looking to the flows between and among water, materiality, meaning, and theory. In this project, water is engaged as a distinctly ecocultural phenomenon that is both material and semiotic. How might we significantly deepen our understandings of not only current environmental challenges, but also the political, economic, and cultural relations that are inextricably tangled therein? How, in turn, can aqueous perspectives on ethics, ontology, sociality, citizenship, representation, difference, and politics transform these fundamental categories of critical thought? Finally, what can a critical engagement with water, as both metaphor and materiality, contribute to the emerging field of environmental cultural theory? Through a deep irrigation of our dominant modes and paradigms of thinking, this project seeks to liberate blocked flows within critical and cultural theory, and to open towards more ethical, respectful and just articulations with water, our planetary lifeblood.

The co-organizers of this project are Astrida Neimanis, Cecilia Chen, and Janine MacLeod. Please also see the support and funding page.