Richard Bater, a third-year PhD candidate at KCL Geography, was recently invited to talk about his researches around water politics on a special edition of ‘Paperweight’ centered on ‘The Ecological’. ‘Paperweight’ is an audio magazine of visual and material culture broadcast on Resonance FM (funded by Arts Council England), that brings together researchers, artists, architects, and designers to consider different themes from a broadly cultural vantage-point, drawing on their respective work.
During the programme, Richard introduced his research into regimes of water regulation in Central Asia since the mid-19th century. Allied to this empirical focus, he also introduced his conceptual interest in how water in particular becomes understood, represented, and governed in historically particular ways. This was briefly explored in two ways. First, branded bottled water was described as archetypical of commoditised water invested with geographically-specific symbolic and exchange value, and used to designate, perform, and enhance social status. This is perhaps only the most explicit instance of how water becomes enclosed as an object of exchange, and much more has been, and could, be said about the different ways of managing water – technically, institutionally – that can engineer and embed social cleavages. Second, Richard talked about the recent moves within critical geopolitics that seeks to question the ‘geo’ as a non-objective, non-apolitical ‘prior’ to the political. As such, Richard sketched out what a critical geopolitics of water could mean for understanding how matters such as water are both particular forces for (geo-)political contestation, but also re-defined in and through such assemblies.
You can listen to the programme again here.
The following links offer some additional insights around some of these questions: