Living with Water

Living with water brings together sociologists, geographers, artists, writers and poets to explore the ways in which water binds, immerses and supports us.

Drawing from international research on river crossings, boat dwelling, wild swimming, sea fishing, and draught impacts, and navigating urban waters, glacial lagoons, barrier reefs and disappearing tarns, the collection illuminates the ways that we live with and without water, and explores how we can think and write with water on land. Water offers a way of attending to emerging and enduring social and ecological concerns and making sense of them in lively and creative ways. By approaching Living with water from different disciplinary and methodological perspectives, and drawing on research from around the world, this collection opens up discussions that reinvigorate and renew previously landlocked debates.

'This edited collection explores how living, thinking and writing with water can act as a vehicle for exploring emerging and persistent social and ecological issues. Structured around three aquatic themes – float, flow, submerge – the contributions are methodologically and textually diverse, including the creative arts, social sciences, history and ethnography, and encompassing a pleasing diversity of writing styles ranging from the personal and confessional to the figurative, theoretical and critical. As a reading experience, it is delightful.'
Karen Throsby, author of Immersion: Marathon Swimming, Embodiment and Identity and Professor of Gender Studies, University of Leeds

‘I love to surf, swim, dive, fish, and sit rugged up in a blanket with hot drink in hand just before plunging into icy winter sea. By diving into this beautifully polymorphous collection of emotional, intoxicating, playful, and daring storytelling you will be carried away by waves of analysis that will in turn alarm you, send shivers of joy across your skin, prompt deep introspection, and leave you with a deeply embodied sense of contentment. The collection is a flowing unity saturated with uncompromising reflexivity, care, and vulnerability that not only enriches thinking, listening, imagining, creating, feeling, and learning with water but perhaps, most importantly of all, a necessary responsibility to this giver of life.’
Clifton Evers, Senior Lecturer in Media & Cultural Studies, Newcastle University

'Living with Water: Everyday Encounters and Liquid Connections moves like the element it studies – fluid yet forceful, gentle yet transformative and connecting different streams of thought just as a river connects its tributaries. The collection brings together currents of sociology, anthropology, environmental studies and artistic practice and, like its subject, refuses to be contained within a single form. It flows through academic analysis, artistic intervention and personal narrative to reveal how water simultaneously shapes our physical environment, social relations, cultural practices and ways of thinking.'
Ningxiang Sun, The Sociological Review

Charlotte Bates is a Lecturer in Sociology at Cardiff University.
Kate Moles is a Lecturer in Sociology at Cardiff University.

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