Matthews, Jamie. 2023. Waves, Floods, Currents: The Politics and Poetics of Water in Social Movement Analysis. Antipode: A Radical Journal of Geography, 55(6), pp. 1822-1840. ISSN 0066-4812 [Article]

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Abstract or Description

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.

Item Type:	Article
Identification Number (DOI):	https://doi.org/10.1111/anti.12946
Data Access Statement:	The small amount of original interview data that support this study are available from the corresponding author [J Matthews], upon reasonable request.
Keywords:	Water, Hydrosocial, Social Movement, Metaphor, Social Theory
Departments, Centres and Research Units:	Sociology
Dates:	Date Event 31 March 2023 Accepted 19 April 2023 Published Online November 2023 Published
Item ID:	33400
Date Deposited:	20 Apr 2023 15:23
Last Modified:	01 Nov 2023 10:30
Peer Reviewed:	Yes, this version has been peer-reviewed.
URI:	https://research.gold.ac.uk/id/eprint/33400

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