Annual International Conference RGS

Bordering inland waterscapes: materialities, mobilities and politics

Session convenors: Maarja Kaaristo (Manchester Metropolitan University), Mathew A. Varghese (Mahatma Gandhi University) and Francesco Visentin (University of Udine)

Format: Papers session, in-person if possible. A decision on this will be made and communicated in April 2021.

This panel will discuss the inland waters (tidal and non-tidal rivers, canals, lakes, reservoirs, estuaries, wetlands, etc.) as borders: sites of liminality, fluidity, hybridity, and mobility. Water bodies are often central to border-making practices: they can form networks as transport corridors or be sites of political demarcation as national borders, realised in varied assemblages of humans, non-humans and materialities. They often also emerge as sites of formal and informal cooperation and transboundary work between different stakeholders and individuals. Water bodies can both divide and unite – often simultaneously – towns, cities, countries, states, as well as communities, groups and individuals. They also function as boundaries between rural and urban, natural and constructed, water and land. This panel will focus on inland waterscapes as borderlands where the varied material and non-material boundaries are managed, governed, practiced, performed, lived, and narrated.  We will study the watery borders as liquid and relational occurrences and consider the various ways human and non-human agencies meet, converge and sometimes clash and what kind of bordering and boundary-making practices emerge as a result of these encounters. 

We welcome papers including (but not limited to): 

·      inland water bodies as geopolitical borders; 

·      cross-border management and hydro-governance of (potable) water;

·      borders of climate crisis and sustainability;

·      everyday practices of bordering; 

·      materialities of watery borders (water, sediment, infrastructure, mundane artefacts); 

·      imaginations, narrations, representations and histories of watery borders; 

·      water borders as sensory, tangible, intangible or virtual places and spaces; 

·      mobilities and immobilities (migration, transnationalism, tourism, commuting);

·      governmentalities and governmobilities

Please send  an abstract of max. 250 words, with author names and affiliations and paper title to m.kaaristo@mmu.ac.ukby 26 February. Please don’t hesitate to email if you have any questions.

More information about the conference can be found here: https://www.rgs.org/research/annual-international-conference/