Available now as an open access download, and forthcoming in Antipode 55(6) in November 2023, Jamie Matthews’ article “Waves, Floods, Currents: The Politics and Poetics of Water in Social Movement Analysis” opens with an intriguing observation…
The task of conceptualising social movements draws on a wealth of watery images, from protest waves and political currents, to imagining mobilisations as tides, ripples, cascades or high-pressure hydraulics. Called upon to analyse complex processes, these waters have a life of their own, carrying analytical implications while extending a relationship to water that is never only symbolic and is material, embodied and historical. This article explores the ways water is “enrolled” to understand movements, to advance three arguments: first, these use familiar water morphologies to naturalise particular, located understandings of political change and social form; second, they imply normative claims and ideological affinities regarding political struggle; third, this has implications for our relationship to water, echoing the abstract and alienating “modern water” of capitalist world-ecology. The article considers how critical water knowledges and subjectivities, often sustained by social movement spaces, indicate possibilities of a being-otherwise with water and its meanings.*
Jamie Matthews is a Lecturer in the Department of Sociology at Goldsmiths, University of London. As well as Antipode, his work on contemporary social movements, popular protest, and cultures of resistance (including anti-austerity movements in the UK, the global Occupy movement, and ecological struggles across Latin America) has been published in The Sociological Review and Social Movement Studies. @JamieXMatthews
*La tarea de conceptualizar los movimientos sociales se basa en una gran cantidad de imágenes acuosas, desde ≪oleadas de protestas≫ y ≪corrientes políticas≫ hasta imaginar movilizaciones como mareas, ondas, cascadas o hidráulicas de alta presión. Llamadas a analizar procesos complexos, estas aguas tienen vida propia, y conllevan implicaciones analíticas al tiempo que extienden una relación con el agua que es material, encarnada e histórica, y no simplemente simbolica. Este artículo explora las formas en que el agua se inscribe para comprender los movimientos, para presentar tres argumentos: primero, utilizan morfologías familiares del agua para naturalizar comprensiones particulares y localizadas del cambio político y la forma social; segundo, implican reclamos normativos y afinidades ideológicas en torno a la lucha política; tercero, esto tiene implicaciones para nuestra relación con el agua, haciéndose eco de la abstracta y alienante “agua moderna” de la ecología-mundo capitalista. El artículo considera cómo los saberes y subjetividades críticos del agua, muchas veces sostenidos por espacios de movimientos sociales, indican posibilidades de un ser-otro con el agua y sus significados.