[Workshop] Water Regimes Questioned from the “Global South”: Agents, Practices and Knowledge

[Workshop] Water Regimes Questioned from the “Global South”: Agents, Practices and Knowledge


Event Details

  • Date:
  • Categories:

Scientific issues:

During the 20th century, water distribution and treatment services (as well as gas, electricity, transportation and telecommunications services) emerged as a socio-technical system, vital for people living in towns and large metropolises. Deeply embedded in the materiality of social life and the environment, the system is closely linked to a physical geography (an hydric resource, pluviometry, terrain, ecosystem) that gives rise to economic factors (fixed assets) and legal institutions (norms, laws, contracts); it also corresponds to an institutional system that manages this resource in a specific territory occupied by social groups, with their conflicting interests; it requires specific skills in terms of administration and engineering and most of the time these are defined by the administrative services responsible for the management and construction of water infrastructures.

Aims of the workshop:
1) Essentially it would allow a first exchange, with a view to a publication, between the researchers specialized in water and working on its agents (engineers, lawyers, etc.), knowledge and practices, particularly interested in an analysis of the socio-technical systems that were established to transform a natural resource into a service in the region under study.

Participation in the workshop
Papers addressing the following areas are particularly welcome:

-Sociological and/or historical studies of different categories of agents who produced or are producing the doxa on water
-Sociological and/or historical approaches dealing with skills, professional practices and knowledge mobilized by these agents
-Historical analysis of the development of different kinds of knowledge (academic, expertise), and their evolution.
-Political economy/critical geographies of (co)production of hydraulic regimes and socio-technical transformation (in terms of new regulations)
-Comparative studies of local and/or national configurations, especially including “South/North” perspectives

Papers are expected to be empirically grounded and proposals should include:
-The title of the paper
-The author (s), their institutional affiliation, phone number and e-mail address
-A brief summary of the paper, including the research problem, the main substantive argument and details regarding material and the methodology mobilized in the paper (not more than 6500 characters)

Abstract proposals are due August 31th, 2015 and should be submitted to waterregimes@gmail.com. The authors of accepted abstracts will be notified by September 1st, 2015. Full papers of accepted abstracts are due on December 1st, 2015.

Date and Venue:
The workshop will be held in Delhi on the 14th 15th and 16th of January 2016 at theCenter for social sciences and humanities (UMIFRE 20, USR 3330 « Savoirs et mondes indiens »).
The 3-day program will include presentations, collective discussions around the presentations, possibly the plan for a first level of publication based on on-going research, the formulation of a comparative problematic between the regions discussed.

For full details please download the attached-file: Water Regimes

You may also like...