Lively water infrastructure: Constructed wetlands in more-than-human waterscapes

Abstract

Water infrastructures are often living infrastructures, whose operation relies on processes involving other-than-human living beings. This article considers the materiality of waterscapes by attending to this liveliness. We argue that critical water research can benefit from situating social relations and water transformations within more-than-human worlds. Our conceptual framework brings hydrosocial scholarship into conversation with more-than-human geography. This opens avenues for interdisciplinary water research that weaves together ecology and qualitative social research. The analytical potential of such a framework is explored through an empirical account grounded in two constructed wetland projects in rural India. These infrastructural assemblages engage humans, other living beings and objects in webs of material-semiotic processes. We present three stories of intra-action that focus on particular plants, microbes and animals within these waterscapes. Our analysis highlights the crucial importance of other-than-human living beings in the production of waterscape knowledge and suggests a need to go beyond the problematisation of ‘uneven’ waterscapes. Approaching waterscapes as more-than-human collectives prompts us to consider the power relations that underpin waterscape knowledge and the politics of multispecies justice. A focus on more-than-human infrastructures opens up the possibility of interdisciplinary water research that is better attuned to the hybrid nature of social and ecological processes, as well as the politics embedded therein.