Reimagining Water Futures is a King’s Cultural Institute project based on scientific ideas evolving from Dr Naho Mirumachi’s newly published book ‘Transboundary Water Politics in the Developing World’. The reflection below was written by two of King’s Water’s 2015-16 postgraduate students, Rebecca Peters and Jack Bathe.
Reimagining Water Futures, an interdisciplinary, exploratory workshop held 29 October at King’s, intertwined insights generated by academic institutions with the creativity of partners across arts sectors including photography, film, and literature. The workshop created an opportunity for participants to speak not just as academics or artists but as individuals interested in communicating and sharing water issues across disciplines. As current MSc candidates in Water: Science and Governance, we found the workshop to successfully unite the traditionally disparate angles of science, academia, and arts.
Given the intensity and diversity of water issues – floods, droughts, drinking water quality issues, environmental pollution, and potential conflict in the context of climate change – broad social engagement is critical. The theme of the workshop, water futures, is a nascent approach to considering the potential of water studies. Therefore, it requires unique imagination, creative power, and intense aspiration. The purpose of the workshop is to go beyond the heavy language typically found in inaccessible textbooks written for academic audiences. Panel and workshop participants, including MSc candidates in Water and Aquatic Resources Management, reflected on what motivates them. Through these reflections, we developed collective critical thinking about how to communicate complex scientific issues not just to each other but to ‘the public’. This reflection is based on an understanding that public engagement is a primary vehicle to affect widespread social change, rather than just speaking to colleagues or to students.
This workshop was conceived of as one way to further critical thinking about these ideas in an open, frank conversation regarding methods to convey complex messages across science, academia, and arts. Ultimately, the collaborators for this workshop embodied their deep care for innovations in public engagement and communication by examining the challenges for art (media, film, journalism) and science to ‘talk to’ one another. This care extended to a consideration to what this public engagement achieves, and what might be criteria of success. We decided upon #reimagineH2O as our hash tag for Twitter, and this may be followed as our work continues.
WORKSHOP BACKGROUND
The workshop began with an introduction from Dr. Naho Mirumachi (Dept. of Geography) and flowed into discussion led by Ruth Macdougall (environmental artist), Anne Krinsky (visual artist), Dr. Maris Rusca (documentary maker and academic), Wendy Barnaby (journalist), and Jane Withers (media arts).
To frame the workshop, Dr. Mirumachi explored the striking relationships between societies and water. She pointed out that over time, many academics beginning with questions regarding the control of nature shift to what kinds of inequalities exist across environmental and economic space as human lives and livelihoods are enmeshed with water resources. The intersection of art and science may help us to shift from thinking about treaties and state to state negotiations to the relationship to daily lives of marginalized people.
Waterscapes relate society to nature, and make us consider how to abstract natural environment, make it an economic space for power and trade. Using photos from her fieldwork, Dr. Mirumachi explored the ways in which nature is an economic setting – both for precarious rural livelihoods (farming, fishing, trade) and for wealthy urban elites. This brings out the intricate global political economies and ecologies that underpin situated lifestyles.
Research in developing countries provides a different context to consider contentious issues of water that go beyond immediate day-to-day challenges but also incorporate geopolitical considerations. Injustices happen as result of this lack of transparency. Ultimately we cannot confront these challenges of inequalities and injustices from a technical perspective. This conversation introduced the next set of workshop proceedings regarding the intersection of art, science, and academia to confront these challenges.
EMERGENT WORKSHOP THEMES AND TOPICS
Environmental art
Ruth Macdougall began this session by asking workshop participants what is missing from historical visualization of the water cycle. By examining the challenges of interpreting complex water issues through visual art, we came to understand that while graphics about the water cycle have become more sophisticated over time, they conceptually neglect human impact. The hydrologic cycle misses over 70 economic and social, and 50 geographic and geologic features.
The process of creating the ‘hydrospiral’ as one tool to account for these missing anthropogenic impacts surfaced through Ruth’s artistic process over time. Using the spiral as a timeline, the shape moves from interventions in irrigation, aqueducts, religious/cultural use of water, water treatment, damming, political impasse, to political conflict. As water flows toward power and money, considerations of political power, social inequity, and water insecurity formerly invisible may be better conceptualized.
However, it became clear that a static image would not suffice. The hydrospiral must be accessible and help develop critical thinking for communication. The process of creation allowed us to ask: Under what conditions can artist-scientist collaborations be activated? How can we construct a criteria for success? How can we understand whether value has been added from the approach?
Visual communication
Next, the workshop explored the role of visual communication to transcend diverse water issues: food, environment, leisure, urban space. Images may pose questions such as: How much water do you eat? Visuals may mediate language and age difference, and by using the visual medium to creatively communicate ways of thinking about water quality in cities, art may be able to communicate numbers and complex quantitative information (such as regarding water consumption).
The ‘universality’ of water issues adds pressure to find ways to convey complexity. As issues of water and climate change are relevant to everyone, approaching complex issues in a visual way may find commonalities in what effectively communicates and might better tackle the issues of representing the ways in which the issues affect everyone differently.
Visual arts can help us to imagine a different world in this way. This goes beyond simply swimming but rather gets at the character of nature in the urban environment. Abstract or hidden concepts are potentially more easily understandable through visual mediums such as film. In the example of Dr. Maria Rusca, the themes of power, money, and justice as explored in her film were illustrated by her filmed conversations and dynamics with the water providers of Maputo. Film allowed allows for a more emotive understanding of the forms of competition between water providers in a dense, desperate urban setting.
Self-identity of artists and academics, or the intersection
Artists often perceive that academics “dumb it down”; this leads to a propensity for power struggle to take place. Artists feel like they need technical knowledge. This leads to an opportunity for artists to develop themselves through processes of individual and group learning. Similarly, many mindful academics doubt that just writing papers is an effective way to share knowledge. The type of research regarding justice, power, and politics may be too self-aggrandizing in the academic world, but communicates well in short movies.
Understanding how to more easily shift between academic research and artistic work to explore new ways to communicate is key to developing an accessible and understandable resource with which to bridge the gap between knowledge producers and potential knowledge consumers (i.e. the public). Topics are ‘treated’ very differently in the way you write a journal article versus way you make film a documentary. Research tends to be stuck in questions of validity, methods, and data, whereas filming a documentary allows us to tell stories, decide which to tell, and how to share. The argument is still being constructed, but how the argument is formed, framed, and presented is fundamentally different.
Prevalent ethical considerations of art regarding making households public, personal lives visible, examining relationships with subjects, and performance issues. In both academia and art, we must ask whether the benefits for participants are tangible, and do efforts go beyond ‘having their voices heard and communicating their perspectives’?
DISCUSSION
Expertise
Experts, by definition, know more about a topic than anyone else. Therefore, everyone else is not an expert, but academics/artists should not make others feel lesser. You may be an expert in one field, and not in another. The ‘expert’ terminology used to describe science are too technical for most audiences
Listening helps us express what you want in the language of your target group, rather than imposing from the outside. The core question to convey across expertise is: What does it mean for me? Finding a personal connection to findings to ask why the consumer/viewer should bother.
Artists do not want to ‘tell’ people what to think, be subtle, show and not tell. Yet it is very complicated to tell/show/learn/explain through art without being analogous to heavy handed academic writing.
Questioning assumptions
Next, the group discussed the importance of asking what the assumptions are amongst art, science, and academia. What are our reasons for collaboration? Participants debated the role for artists to consider their publics and to consider the role of research and knowledge production. Academics and artists both come from specific angles, and both have partial points of view.
Art has a unique ability to make academics reconnect with water on a personal and emotional, a more human, level. Art may inspire academics to more creatively interpret what happens as it happens. By examining situations, listening to how things are said rather than just what is said. Academics may admire or envy the visual learning and teaching strategies and inspirations of the art world but often do not know how to use them. The immediacy with which visual strategies can be used to engage with contemporary issues far exceeds the ability of the traditional academic whose years of work result in the possible publication within a journal or in a book. The artist can experience an issue and present it, given though, within a short space of time and in a form far more identifiable to a greater number of people. A collaboration between the two, therefore, has the ability to engage with a wide audience over various temporal scales.
Broadening the conversation
As the workshop wrapped up, participants considered the issue that many people attending are already aware of – critical social and environmental issues. This may lead to confirmation bias and a continuation of well-read, middle class consumers involved in internal conversations rather than influencing broader public opinion.
Consequently, we must think both strategically and visually about how to strengthen audience engagement between science and art. As artists, academics, and scientists communicate to different audiences, they must consider who is reading and who is listening; they must imagine what will make sense to ‘knowledge consumers’. Academics must ‘get out of the box’ and consider meeting formats where participants can actively contribute. This may include considering the ways that art and media is powerful, special, and different; it is a less explicit “translation” and can be more abstract. As interpretive power and context becomes increasingly important in the intersection of art, academia, and science, knowing how to communicate is challenging and requires knowledge sharing.
Concluding considerations: what’s next?
The workshop ended on a high note, with big questions emerging. Attendees were primarily interests in understanding the current gaps that must be identified, assessed, and potentially met by this kind of new, creative approach to reimagining water. In revisiting our initial framing questions, workshop participants asked how we might individually and collectively innovate communication by examining the ability of art (media, film, journalism) and science to convey information to one another. The workshop provided unique analytical purchase to our own academic focuses and we look forward to our next opportunity to #reimagineH2O with this group.