MdM Keynote Speaker Series 2022- "Rivers, territories and power", by Rutgerd Boelens

Rutgerd Boelens, Professor of Political Ecology of Water at the University of Amsterdam & Professor of Water Governance and Social Justice at the Wageningen University, will be giving the keynote “RIVERS, TERRITORIES AND POWER. Conceptualizing Transdisciplinary Movements for Water Justice”.
 

MdM Keynote Speaker Series 2022 

Title: "Rivers, territories and power. Conceptualizing Transdisciplinary Movements for Water Justice"

Speaker:  Rutgerd Boelens, Professor of Political Ecology of Water at the University of Amsterdam & Professor of Water Governance and Social Justice at the Wageningen University

Date: Monday, 24^th of October 2022 
Time: From 15:00 to 16:00   
Venue: Sala Antoni Rosell (Room Z/023) - Online: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/84502375645?pwd=b1ZkdjBqZTRiRERtakdvZUlSSTFJUT09  

 
BRIEF BIOGRAPHY and RESEARCH INTERESTS  

Rutgerd Boelens is Professor ‘Water Governance and Social Justice’ at Wageningen University, The Netherlands, and Professor ‘Political Ecology of Water in Latin America’ 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, environmental justice and social mobilization, mainly in Latin America and Europe. See www.researchgate.net/profile/Rutgerd-Boelens  and https://research.wur.nl/en/persons/rutgerd-boelens/publications/  and  https://wageningenur.academia.edu/RutgerdBoelens  
 

TOPIC of the KEYNOTE  

This presentation focuses on how mega-dams, pollution and water depletion have endangered the world's rivers; how modernist imaginaries of colonizing and ordering "rebellious waters and peoples" have become powerful cornerstones of hydraulic-bureaucratic and techno-capitalist development; and how these imaginaries simultaneously separate ecological and social worlds, marginalize river cultures and deepen socio-environmental injustices. Next, it reflects on how, recently, countless new water justice movements (NWJMs) have proliferated around the world: entrenched, disruptive, transdisciplinary and multi-scalar coalitions that deploy diverse alternative ontologies of river/fluvial society, challenge South-North and human-nature divides, translate and hybridize river enlivening notions and practices from local to global and vice versa, and claim for environmental justice. The presentation will discuss a transdisciplinary framework for conceptualizing "riverhood" with the aim of learning from and engaging with NWJMs and river commoning initiatives. It suggests four interrelated ontological core windows that situate fluvial socionatures as arenas of material, social and symbolic co-production: 'river-as-ecosociety', 'river-as-territory', 'river-as-subject'; and 'river-as-movement'. The presentation crosses the political and conceptual fields of governmentality, hydrosocial territories, onto-epistemological arenas and multi-scale movements, to propose a shared action research framework and alliance for socio-environmental and water justice (www.movingrivers.org).