(In)visible fluidities across sandscapes: Sand dredging and local socio-environmental impacts along the Red and Mekong Rivers

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River sand, in its fluid form, is constantly shifting, being displaced through human activities and hydrological processes. The specific connections between the drivers and consequences of sand displacement are difficult to isolate. An emerging concept to help unpack such connections is the sandscape, which encompasses the social-ecological interactions and spatial reconfigurations that the movement and transformation of this granular resource yield. Focusing on riparian communities along the Red River in China and Mekong River in Cambodia, we pay attention to how the fluid interactions of sand and water entwine people, nature and power. We examine how sand mining has emerged alongside other drivers of change in riparian ecosystems, including river damming and infrastructure development. While sand mining impacts local sandscapes – with erosion being the most visible imprint –, riparian communities do not systematically attribute these shifts to sand dredging specifically. Explanations include that people cannot always openly critique sand mining, a sensitive issue in these authoritarian states, but also that sandscape modifications are difficult to parse out amongst the rapid social-ecological changes riparian dwellers experience. We unveil these obscuring factors and enhance sand legibility by further conceptualizing how sand, water, people and power meet and shift across these two sandscapes.