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Waterworlding

Photo: Colourbox.de

Waterworlding is an umbrella for a wide range of events and activities around an ethnographic/cultural-theoretical approach to water in teaching and research at the Institute of European Ethnology and Studies in Culture and Historyat Marburg University in Germany. We are currently building up presentation forms for activities and research output on PECE Hamburg and STS infrastructures. In terms of content, the interest in Marburg primarily lies on the exploration of water as a technological experience and here especially on digital water.

"Digital water as a term describes all relations of humans, more-than-human organisms, and water in which mathematization and digital technologies are used in very different ways with the aim to make the difficult materialities of water tangible." (Dietzsch Wasserwirtschaft 5/2022: 40)

News: This summer semester 2023, in collaboration with the disciplines of New German Literature (Prof. Marion Schmaus) and Media Studies (Prof. Angela Krewani) an interdisciplinary course will take place which takes the water of the local reservoir lake Edersee for a boundary object.

  • Funding

    Seed Money from UMR (2020-22/3)

  • Presentations

    - Ina Dietzsch: Urban Waters. Modern Water decentered. Paper, World Canals Conference, Leipzig 2/6/2022

    - Ina Dietzsch: Hydro-soziale Verflechtungen, Hydrokolonialismus, Hydrofeminismus... Zugänge eines kritischen Posthumanismus [Hydro-social entanglements, hydro-colonialism, hydrofeminism… Approaches of critical posthumanism] Vortrag: Institutskolloquium EE Graz, 27/1/2022

    - Ina Dietzsch: Drawing Virtual Water. Paper at: Anthropology beyond text? Experiments, devices and platforms of multimodal ethnographic practice, Digital Workshop, Stadtlabor for Multimodal Anthropology, IfEE, HU Berlin, 22/7/-23/7/2021

    - Ina Dietzsch: The Rhythms of Urban Water. Paper at: Annual Conference STS.ch 15/2/-17/2/2021

    Abstract:
    The growing awareness in cultural anthropology of fragile worlds is shaped by unstable borders, in which people, things and ideas move. It takes place in a theoretical thinking that makes fluidity the starting point. This thinking is fed by considerations such as a “fluid modernity” (Baumann), which is characterized by volatile structures, flexible people and unexpected fears and risks that intertwine human and non-human life, be it in the form of polluted air, leaking infrastructures or through technology that fuses with the body. In my paper I pursued this idea of fluidity in more detail using the example of urban water. I showed the different spaces that the river Rhine creates, depending on who and what it gathers and consider this in connection with different forms of rhythm (water levels, temperature measurements, digitization, water management in relation to other urban rhythms, etc.) and thus show how rhythms create order and disorder within an entanglement of diverse urban waters.

    - Ina Dietzsch: The Upper Rhine. Mapping a fluid ensemble. Paper at SIEF 2019 Santiago de Compostela: Track Changes: Reflecting on a Transforming World, 14/4/-17/4/2019

    Abstract:
    The trinational upper Rhine region is by definition one that heavily relates to its waters: the Rhine as an infrastructure of transportation, a source of drinking water, a place to swim, a lifeworld of a variety of species and a landscape that is shaped by water that relates mountains and cities. The theoretical anthropological approach that “thinks” a region “through water” (see Strang and Krause in several publications) draws the attention to social-technical ensembles of heterogenous elements which are held together by or with water of different ontologies: water as a physical fluid, virtual water as subject of political or economic activities of regulation or competition, be it water on paper or digitized. Inspired by Astrid Oberborbeck Andersen‘s “Mapping Urban Waters” (2016) my paper will focus on scarcity and/or abundance of water as self-evident or problematic in relation to topographic and topological mapping practices. Referring to the “crisis” of Rhine water this summer I will ask how people, animals and non-living material objects are differently ordered in relation to changing water levels.

  • Publications

    - Ina Dietzsch: Wenn Wasser die Natur verlässt… Wie Humanwissenschaften Wasser denken. In: Wasserwirtschaft 5/2022 [When water goes beyond nature… How social sciences and humanities think water]

    - Ina Dietzsch: Von Pfützen und Lücken. Urbanes Wasser posthumanistisch gelesen. [Of puddles and gaps. Reading urban water with posthumanism] In: Oliwia Murawska/Torsten Cress/Annika Schlitte: Posthuman? Perspektiven auf Natur/Kultur. Paderborn: Wilhelm Fink 2023 [im Erscheinen]

    - Ina Dietzsch: Waterworlds revisited. In: Hamburger Journal für Kulturanthropologie 2021, Heft 13, 79-95.

    - Ina Dietzsch: ANT. [ActorNetworkTheory] In: Tauschek, Markus/Heimerdinger, Timo (Hg.) (2020): Kulturanthropologisch argumentieren. UTB, 77-99.

     

Contact: Prof. Dr. Ina Dietzsch