Moving Water: deology and Hydrology in Human-Environmental Relations

Description

Professor Veronica Strang (Director of the Institute of Advanced Study at the University of Durham)

 

We have an additional Climate Histories seminar scheduled.

Veronica combines vivid theoretical insight into the role of water in human culture with practical reflections on social problems involving water in contemporary life, and is currently involved as an advocate for Australian indigenous groups in disputes surrounding the privitisation of water and issues of water management.

 

Drawing on ethnographic research in Australia, this paper explores human relationships with water and the influence of particular practices on the flows of water through social and ecological systems. It observes that while water's material properties have significant agentive force in defining how people think about and use water resources, the intensifying imposition of human agency on hydrological flows and the diversion of water into human productive processes have multiple anthropogenic effects. Ideologies of growth and expansion are central to this interaction, and the paper considers how these redirect the movements of water through local, regional and planetary systems with critical implications for environmental change. 

 

 

Open to all.  No registration required.

Part of the Climate Histories Interdisciplinary Seminar series.
For more information about the group please click the link on the right hand of this  page