Description
The Blue Humanities have recently emerged as a subfield of Ecocriticism replacing land-centered knowledge systems and semantic frameworks through water-centered approaches of knowing and being in the world. Various countries are now acknowledging rivers as persons with inalienable rights. Such a process is often set in motion by local indigenous groups that use mythologies, situated knowledges, and activism to take freshwater bodies out of colonial contexts in which they have been straight-jacketed, dammed, polluted, and violated in various other ways. Material and symbolic Indigenous conceptualizations of water, for instance by Michi Saagiig Nishinaabeg scholar Leanne Betasamosake Simpson’s recent book theory of water: Nishnaabee Maps to the Times Ahead, create a water consciousness that values rivers in their own rights. Western new nature writers as, for example Robert MacFarlane in his book Is a River Alive? have made a reencounter and reevaluation of rivers possible.
The breakout group would start out by discussing a presentation of the key elements of the above-mentioned indigenous and changed ecological Western understandings of river: How do they shift epistemological, ontological, and representational ways of thinking and being with water? How do they allow us to re-encounter and reassess rivers? In a second step, we would sound out ways to interweave Western and indigenous knowledges as well as data and cultural sciences to arrive at alternative ways of assessing rivers and human-water relationships.
| Topic | Topic 1: : Methods for integrating social and ecological knowledge |
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