ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Water Knowledge and Water Experts II

Session Submission Type: Organized Session

English Abstract

Waters have always been plural: fresh and salty, frozen and evaporated, rushing and still. Their significance for human societies is no less ambivalent: essential to life yet deadly threats, precious sources of energy but also hazardous carriers of waste and disease. Interactions between humans and waters have accordingly taken numerous forms. Within these interactions, our panels focus on water knowledge and water experts. Building on recent scholarship in the histories of science and the environment, we aim to decentre established, institutionalized forms of expertise about water and ask: what would plural, fluid histories of water knowledge look like, if water experts included not only engineers, overseers, and officials but also farmers, fisherfolk, health workers, laundresses, cesspit diggers and sailors?
This question is relevant across geographic and chronological boundaries, which is why we have gathered early modernists and modernists working on disparate regions, highlighting how local ecologies have always shaped ways of knowing and working with water – and vice versa. By coming together around the common theme of water knowledge and experts, we will have stimulating conversations that explore how people in the past came to obtain knowledge about water, who claimed expertise and power over water, and how specific types of formalized, institutionalized expertise precluded other forms of knowledge from flourishing. By highlighting a wide variety of sources, many of which have been underexplored by historians of science, we show how archival and historical practices have shaped our understanding of expertise. Ultimately, the panel seeks to reflect on a fundamental question: how can we best order and honour our material to write histories that acknowledge and underwrite the bounty of various currents of water knowledge, without establishing new hierarchies in the process?

Sub Unit

• Organized Session

Chair

• Claire Stichting Weeda, Leiden University

Individual Presentations

• “This country work”: Enslaved people’s water knowledges in nineteenth-century Berbice - Frederick Bricknell, University of Hull

• Contested Waterscapes: Plural Water Knowledge and Environmental Transformation along the Canal del Dique - Christiane Hoth de Olano, Dr

• Troubled waters: encounters between colonial and local hydro-knowledges in French Guiana - Marquisar Jean-Jacques

• Thirsty cities: upending hierarchies of water knowledge in the colonial Guianas - Davide Martino, Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB)

Session Organizers

• Davide Martino, Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB)

• Anna-Luna Post, Leiden University