hydrocommoning – Lisa Blackmore

photograph of the exhibition Humid Traces

Keynote: Hydrocommoning – Practices of Care and Connection to and through Water

by Lisa May 26, 2026May 26, 2026No Comments

From receding glaciers, via polluted rivers to fragile wetlands, rising water stresses across the world are impelling communities to foster more respectful and sustainable water cultures. Drawing on fieldwork, archival research, and curatorial projects across Latin America, this talk proposes “hydrocommoning” as a conceptual horizon for creative practices that nurture connections and coalitions around bodies of …

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 …