NCRM videos

Arianna Tozzi - Visualizing Groundwaterscapes

06-11-2019

Arianna Tozzi from The University of Manchester presents 'Visualizing ‘Groundwaterscapes’ - Making Creative Critical Counter-Cartographies of an Invisible Common Resource' at Methods Fair 2019. Abstract: Groundwater provides 98% of freshwater available on Earth (UNESCO, 2015). It sustains the livelihood of rural communities in semi-arid regions, providing a flexible buffer during scarcity. To quench the thirst of cities, agri-businesses and industries, this invisible resource is increasingly overexploited, endangering the resilience of the socio-natural environment. I will develop a methodology to visualize ‘groundwaterscapes’, using creative critical counter-cartographies in a community in India. The image will emerge from a patchwork of maps collected throughout my research, each representing a ‘worlding’ (Goldman, Turner and Daly, 2018); a way of being, understanding and knowing the world, built from the positions actors and actants occupy. This messy patchwork combines maps-as-usual (GIS images, water quality measurements, etc.) with creative ways of mapping-back. Firstly, I will conduct ethnographic mapping with community members, tracing the history of groundwater as a dynamic and emotionally entangled resource within the socio-natural landscape. Secondly, I will use positional cartographies to document my own subjectivity as fluid and evolving. This will facilitate a critical reflection of my positionality within my field-of-work and academic practice, paying attention to ethics while representing others. This methodology is a commitment to take seriously multiple ontologies and epistemologies, thus encouraging a politics of solidarity based on affinities across ‘imagined communities’ (Mohanty, 1988). To create a world that admits plural and equitable resiliences (Anderson, 2015), we should imagine the “possible-but-not-yet, or that which is not-yet-but-still-open” (Haraway, 2019).