Panel convenors: Filippo Menga (University of Bergamo); Maria Rusca (University of Manchester); Nate Millington (University of Manchester)
Date and Place: 28-30 June 2023, Reading, UK and online
Please note: All proposals must be submitted via this link: https://nomadit.co.uk/conference/dsa2023/p/13009#
The popularity of the notion of the Anthropocene – an unstable geological epoch in which humans and their actions are the main driver of environmental change – seems unstoppable. With it, comes the acknowledgment that environmental degradation and global warming foreshadow an approaching catastrophe that will diminish, if not devastate, life for future generations. Unsurprisingly, the concept has raised a heated debate within critical development studies and geography. On the one hand, some have argued that growing recognition that “humans are (literally) writing themselves into Earth history”, makes the separation between nature and society increasingly untenable (Castree, 2015, p. 302). On the other, whist the concept of the Anthropocene epitomises “human-caused planetary violence”, it also risks concealing the differentiated geographical inequalities of “responsibility and sacrifice” (DeBoom, 2021, p. 900; Ernstson & Swyngedouw, 2018) and to treat humanity as an “undifferentiated whole” (Moore, 2017, p. 595). With these debates in mind, in this panel we explore water crisis is framed and spatially unfolds in the Anthropocene. The idea of the global water crisis fits well into this narrative. Water is both a global resource, which freely circulates in the atmosphere, and a local one, whose scarcity is felt most by local communities and users. Until recently, the ‘global’ water crisis was spatially unfolding in a generic and distant ‘developing world’. But in the Anthropocene, the water crisis occurs in places that had been so far shielded from it, as evidenced by recent events in Europe and the United States. This is due to the combined workings of climate change and decades of underinvestment in hydraulic infrastructure, alongside broader patterns of austerity, infrastructural inequality, and uneven development.
In this panel we seek contributions that speak to how the water crisis unfolds in the Anthropocene. Submissions are invited on questions that include but are not limited to:
- How can we problematise the idea of the Anthropocene through a critical understanding of the global water crisis?
- What forms of environmental Orientalism mark the political discourse around the water crisis?
- How do discourses of the global water crisis intersect with localized infrastructural inequality and vulnerability?
- What are the discursive politics of global water crisis?
- Can comparative analysis offer insight into contemporary water crisis?
- How should we understand the relationship between water crisis and climate crisis?
References
Castree, N. (2015). Changing the Anthropo (s) cene: Geographers, global environmental change and the politics of knowledge. Dialogues in Human Geography, 5(3), 301-316.
DeBoom, M. J. (2020). Climate necropolitics: Ecological civilization and the distributive geographies of extractive violence in the Anthropocene. Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 111(3), 900-912.
Ernstson, H., & Swyngedouw, E. (Eds.). (2018). Urban political ecology in the anthropo-obscene: Interruptions and possibilities. Routledge.
Moore, J. W. (2017). The Capitalocene, Part I: on the nature and origins of our ecological crisis. The Journal of peasant studies, 44(3), 594-630.
Filippo Menga 