In this talk, I presented ‘hydrocommoning’ as a concept to think with emergent water cultures by asking what work a theory and praxis of hydrocommoning might do to support transitions to alternative hydrosocial relations beyond modern urban and extractive paradigms. I laid out a methodological route for interdisciplinary water research that takes seriously situated embodied knowledge and planetary hydrologies by arguing for the generative role of art in igniting multiscalar engagements with liquid ecologies.
I shared insights from a chapter from my in-progress monograph on art and water, scrutinizing how the structural forces of colonialism, modernity and extractivism have instrumentalized water by separating humans from nature and elucidating initial hydrocommoning practices as pathways toward other ways of hydrosocial being. I traced this praxis through contemporary Indigenous thought and activism that resist the enclosure and objectification of water by insisting on ways of being with it. And, I explored two recent artworks, by Carolina Caycedo and Regina José Galindo, created at the intersections of extractivism and activism to make a case for the generative role that art can play in struggles for more just water cultures.
October 16 @ 12:00 pm – 1:30 pm | Humanities 1, Room 210
Thanks to the Cultural Studies Colloquium, The Humanities Institute and More-than-Human(ities) Laboratory for the invitation!