Water Governance Webinar Series - Arts & Multiple Water Knowledges

In recent years, a great deal of research across various disciplines has demonstrated the need to develop inclusive and transformative modes of water governance (if this is even the right word) that can make space for a multiplicity of water knowledges, experiences and values. Actually doing this in real world contexts of competing interests and forms of evidence is another question of course! Some of the most inventive and promising approaches toward addressing this conundrum have come from the arts.  As part of the water@leeds and Water Governance Group webinar series The School of Performance and Cultural Industries and the Water Value Research Group invite you to a presentation and discussion involving three fantastic speakers who will share some of their experiences of working with water, people and art in the UK and South Africa.

Audiovisual artist, Kathy Hinde, shares sounds, images and experiences from encounters with watery environments, generated through durational, process-led enactments including Deep Listening walks and analogue film-making.  In relation to her recent project on ‘Rewilding Water Data’ Kathy will share documentation from these works, and reflect on how listening to water can offer new perspectives and possibilities towards a future more deeply connected to other species and the earth’s systems.

Amber Abrams, a Carnegie DEAL research fellow at the University of Cape Town in the Future Water Institute, focuses on social sciences and human health around water.  Amber’s current research ranges across topics that include exploring water uses and users’ perspectives in the Table Mountain National Park area, developing a water museum, researching social aspects of resource recovery from waste-water, exploring health vulnerability in the context of extreme weather events, and a range of public health and social engagement projects focused on water quality/toxicity that make use of arts-based approaches. Amber will introduce some of the arts-based approaches she has used to research and understand people’s valuations of water.

Marieke Norton is an environmental anthropologist, based at the University of Cape Town, whose research focusses on the relationality in the field of marine social-ecological systems.  Her work has looked at the issues of change in coastal communities, marine resource law enforcement, perceptions of marine protected areas and how to nurture care-taking towards coastal and marine systems.  Most recently, she has done work with the Southern Cape Interdisciplinary Fisheries Research Project (SCIFR), under the South African Research Chair in Marine Ecologies and Fisheries, working on a collaboration between the sciences and the arts that resulted in a theatrical performance co-produced with a local fishing community in the Southern Cape, South Africa. Marieke will share some of her experiences of this collaboration.

Image courtesy of Caroline Wilson (UCL).