Re-membering water: community water politics and new materialisms

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dc.contributor.authorO'Donovan, Órla
dc.date.accessioned2019-01-09T14:49:15Z
dc.date.available2019-01-09T14:49:15Z
dc.date.issued2018-12-26
dc.date.updated2019-01-07T15:16:28Z
dc.description.abstractIn community struggles over water, privatisation, and the commons, we often share words but speak different languages, resulting in different understandings of the problems we are trying to address and strategies for addressing them. This introduction to the Special Issue begins by considering keywords in community hydropolitics, giving special attention to water. In tracing various senses in which a keyword is used, following Raymond Williams’ highly influential book Keywords. A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (1983, p. 15), I show how the ‘problems of its meaning …[are] inextricably bound up with the problems it [is] being used to discuss’. Keywords are socially prominent, but also contested, words in contemporary public debate. As explained by the Keywords Project,1 which was inspired by and has updated Williams’ work, failing ‘to grasp the complexity of a word can lead to cross purposes and confusion in public debate as well as in personal conversation’. Investigation of keywords involves tracing historical changes of meaning, but also multiple concurrent meanings and the political nature of those meanings. It brings attention to how certain meanings of words are part of broad worldviews or perceptual landscapes, as illustrated in the classic post-development and feminist counter-dictionaries The Development Dictionary. A Guide to Knowledge as Power (Sachs, 1992) (that will be discussed later) and Websters’ First New Intergalactic Wickedary of the English Language (Daly, 1987). Commenting on the contradictory and confusing understandings of the commons, Erik Swyngedouw (in Wagner, 2012, p. 635) argues that ‘the cacophony of ways of imagining and/or theorizing as well as institutionally configuring the commons, in both scholarly and public imaginaries, posits precisely the (disavowed) political nature of ‘the commons’’. Keywords analysis recognises that words, as symbolic resources, are something we inherit, but also the definition of their meanings is bound up with power relations and uses by different social groups of speakers and writers, for different purpose. But we do not only inherit words and meanings; the crafting of new ones can form part of the crafting of new politics.en
dc.description.statusPeer revieweden
dc.description.versionAccepted Versionen
dc.format.mimetypeapplication/pdfen
dc.identifier.citationO’Donovan, Ó. (2018) 'Re-membering water: community water politics and new materialisms', Community Development Journal, bsy061 (14 pp). doi: 10.1093/cdj/bsy061en
dc.identifier.doi10.1093/cdj/bsy061
dc.identifier.endpage14en
dc.identifier.issn0010-3802
dc.identifier.issn1468-2656
dc.identifier.issued1en
dc.identifier.journaltitleCommunity Development Journalen
dc.identifier.startpage1en
dc.identifier.urihttps://hdl.handle.net/10468/7276
dc.identifier.volume54en
dc.language.isoenen
dc.publisherOxford University Pressen
dc.relation.urihttps://academic.oup.com/cdj/advance-article/doi/10.1093/cdj/bsy061/5261210
dc.rights© Oxford University Press and Community Development Journal 2018. This is a pre-copyedited, author-produced PDF of an article accepted for publication in Community Development Journal following peer review. The version of record is available online at: https://doi.org/10.1093/cdj/bsy061en
dc.subjectWateren
dc.subjectCommunity hydropoliticsen
dc.subjectNew materialismsen
dc.titleRe-membering water: community water politics and new materialismsen
dc.typeArticle (peer-reviewed)en
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