Events

Prof Rutgerd Boelens: “Rivers, Territories, Movements. Water justice and counter-mapping struggles to bridge river commoning in Latin America and beyond”

Monday 17 November 12.30-14

Old Library Seminar A/B or on Teams

Mega-damming, pollution and depletion endanger rivers worldwide. Meanwhile, modernist imaginaries of ordering ‘unruly waters and humans’ have become cornerstones of hydrocratic and capitalist development. They separate hydro/social worlds, sideline river-commons cultures, and deepen socio-environmental injustices. The corresponding cartographic governance techniques re-present rivers’ nature and society as extraction sites, legitimizing peasant-, indigenous- and fishing-commons’ territorial transformations. But myriad new water justice movements proliferate: rooted, transdisciplinary, multi-scalar coalitions that deploy alternative river–society ontologies, bridge South–North divides, and translate river-enlivening practices from local to global and vice-versa.

In this lecture, Boelens first presents a collective framework that conceptualizes ‘riverhood’ to engage with these movements and commoning initiatives. It suggests four interrelated ontologies: ‘river-as-ecosociety’, ‘river-as-territory’, ‘river-as-subject’, and ‘river-as-movement’. Second, he examines the Traveling Rivers initiative, linking grassroots artist-activism, engaged academia and river commoning struggles through counter-mapping. Bridging six river conflict-arenas in Colombia and Ecuador, local knowledges, strategies and struggles converse and cross-pollinate across contexts, invigorating ‘living with the river’ proposals and forging river-defence networks. Grassroots counter-mapping among socio-fluvial struggles may mobilize new concepts and strategies to contest river grabbing and misrepresentation, strengthening ‘rivers of resistance’ that break away from imposed status quo river governance.

Rutgerd Boelens is Professor ‘Water Governance and Social Justice’ at Wageningen University, The Netherlands, and Professor ‘Political Ecology of Water’ with CEDLA, University of Amsterdam. He also is Visiting Professor at the Catholic University of Peru and the Central University of Ecuador. He coordinates the Justicia Hídrica/Water Justice alliance (www.justiciahidrica.org) and the international research and action programs Riverhood and River Commons (www.movingrivers.org). His research focuses on political ecology, water rights, legal pluralism, water cultures and cultural politics, governmentality, hydrosocial territories, river politics, environmental justice and social mobilization, mainly in Latin America and Europe.