Critical Water Geographies: From Histories to Affect

Abstract

Water resource geography has undergone a considerable transformation since its original moorings in engineering and the pure sciences. As this Special Issue demonstrates, many intellectual and practical gains are being made through a politicized practice of water scholarship. This work by geographers integrates a critical social scientific perspective on agency, power relations, method and most importantly the affective/emotional aspects of water with profound familiarity and expertise across sub-disciplines and regions. Here, the ‘critical’ aspects of water resource geography imply anti-positivist epistemologies pressed into the service of contributing to social justice and liberation from water-related political and material struggles. The five papers making up this Special Issue address these substantive and theoretical concerns across South and West Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa and North America.

Keywords

• critical geography
• social–hydrological systems
• methodological pluralism
• access
• water affect
• scale