hydrocommoning – Lisa Blackmore

Global Waterways: Sharing research on “perfomative hydraulics” at Stony Brook University

by Lisa March 23, 2026No Comments

Hydrocommoning Through Pumping: Performative Hydraulics in São Paulo’s Urban Rivers In this paper, I develop the concept of “hydrocommoning” to examine how artistic and activist practices reconfigure human–water relations in São Paulo. I situate these practices within the city’s hydraulic history: from Indigenous habitation along the Tamanduateí to twentieth-century channelization, river reversal, and stream burial …

Image of sign saying Cuidemos el agua - let's care for water.

New article: Hydrocommoning, Environmental Humanities Glossary

by Lisa August 10, 2025February 15, 2026No Comments

I was grateful to receive the invitation from Ulrik Ekman to contribute to the Environmental Humanities Glossary. It was an opportunity to publish a short piece on the concept of hydrocommoning, the title of my forthcoming book with University of Minnesota Press, and to think through Leanne Betasamosake Simpson’s Theory of Water, which I had …

Hydrocommoning, Cultural Studies Colloquium, UC Santa Cruz

by Lisa October 24, 2024October 24, 2024No Comments

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 …