Abstract
Water resource geography has undergone a considerable transformation since its original moorings in engineering and the pure sciences. As this Special Issue demonstrates, many intellectual and practical gains are being made through a politicized practice of water scholarship. This work by geographers integrates a critical social scientific perspective on agency, power relations, method and most importantly the affective/emotional aspects of water with profound familiarity and expertise across sub-disciplines and regions. Here, the ‘critical’ aspects of water resource geography imply anti-positivist epistemologies pressed into the service of contributing to social justice and liberation from water-related political and material struggles. The five papers making up this Special Issue address these substantive and theoretical concerns across South and West Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa and North America.
Highlights
The stanza we feature at the beginning of this essay by Ibn-e-Insha (1927–1978), a Pakistani poet, identifies three heroes—Qais, Farhad and Ranjha—from immortal romantic legends in Arabic, Farsi and Punjabi cultures
To historical hydro-social imaginaries, to hegemonic knowledge value systems, to tensions between those systems and lived local scale worlds of emotion, memory, sociability and solidarity, the tropes explored in this Special Issue help us think about ways through which unequal power relations can be materially and discursively demystified and undermined
We identify this intellectual practice as critical water resource geography, grounded in a deeply held view that socio-hydrological systems and landscapes are produced through colonial histories, social stratifications, racist and gendered ideologies as well as an abundance of interactions between water, geology, biophysical elements, topography, and changing climate
Summary
The stanza we feature at the beginning of this essay by Ibn-e-Insha (1927–1978), a Pakistani poet, identifies three heroes—Qais, Farhad and Ranjha—from immortal romantic legends in Arabic, Farsi and Punjabi cultures. The gains are demonstrated in the work of geographers who integrate a critical social scientific perspective on agency, power relations, and social dynamics with profound familiarity and expertise with specific areas of water science, engineering, and/or other water-related disciplines We identify this intellectual practice as critical water resource geography, grounded in a deeply held view that socio-hydrological systems and landscapes are produced through colonial histories, social stratifications, racist and gendered ideologies as well as an abundance of interactions between water, geology, biophysical elements, topography, and changing climate. Beyond a resource for economic development and accumulation, it is imbricated in questions of esthetics (Zenko and Menga, 2019); well-being (Turley and Caretta, 2020); history, identity, sociability, social justice (Rusca and Di Baldassarre, 2019); empire and gender (Halvorson and James, 2020); and nation building (Aijaz and Akhter, 2020) The contributions in this Special Issue speak to the question of emotions, as well as methodological questions of affect, in addition to the histories and geographies of exclusion and heroic water engineering. Political Ecology (Sultana, 2020) [2], features as prominently in this Special Issue
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