Ideas Exchange 2023/2024

Water offers to bodies a sense of comfort, relief, support - a sense of being held, a gravity-free realm for movement, transcendence, flow... Rivers hold and host communities, ways of being together, along riverbanks or in waters... Digital platforms support these communities in coming together - detailing swim spots, safety zones, clean waters, and as sites for activism. This project is about the ways in which we can collectively know a river / body of water, and what stories emerge from this collective knowing across sociodigital spaces, and how these stories might help shape river futures across physical and virtual materialities / infrastructures that are equitable, inclusive, sustainable.

What will the project involve? 

This project aims to explore water futures through understanding how a particular community of water users and experts relate to a specific natural body of water (e.g. river Avon). It will involve creative explorations of sensory, emotional and affective relationships with water, while encompassing the complex networks of actors and infrastructures that exist in and around these relationships. A river is a conceived, documented and datafied space, as much as a living and liveable space. How do humans exist within a wider network of non-humans around rivers? Animate and inanimate, technological and sedimental, these actors are part of the relationships that communities develop with water.

With evidence pointing to the direct, and often harmful, relationship between the air and water quality of spaces and the health of the bodies inhabiting them (Kjellstrom et al, 2006), this project will question the equity of access to safe water, as “environmental exposures [that are harmful] are experiences lived within spaces of considerable uncertainty” (Gabrys, 2017). Taking into account the wider sociodigital and sociotechnical infrastructures which monitor, quantify, inform and communicate about and around bodies of water, this project aims at rethinking care beyond moral prescription, as a “speculative mode of encounter” (Gabrys, 2017)

Beyond datafication of rivers, the researchers want to speculate and reflect on other ways of knowing a river, allowing space for caring relationships between communities and their environments. How does a qualitative, embodied approach to understanding/knowing water can be explored alongside the quantitative environmental data? How can we imagine and (re)-story water / rivers? What would a caring policy towards water look like? Is there a new space for policy within this affective domain between bodies and rivers?

The team intend to gather an expert community on water futures to model a co-design process and test ways in which they can carefully and ethically co-design with river communities, as well as exploring stakeholder's ways of knowing and thus representing (physically and digitally) the river. This process will involve exploring the participants’ relationships with specific bodies of water/rivers, through conversations, creative provocations and group practices of / with / by rivers.

The project will invite various experts working with rivers – researchers, artists from different disciplines and members of environmental organisations (Defra, Rivers Trust, Environment Agency). The team are interested in how sociodigital practices and imaginaries associated with water / rivers intersect with the notion of environmental ‘care’ within these experts’ practices, to explore what care means in this context, and to explore potential ‘caring futures’ for water.

The collective team will take a trip to a river and spend the day together by / with / at the water. The day will include activities that will engage bodies and imaginations and eating lunch together (picnic or wet weather alternative).

Some of the questions the team will ask are:

• What is our relationship to water / rivers? Swimming together, gathering by water, what draws people to water?
• What does water do for us, what do we do for / to water?
• Which water do we care for? Why? How do we care?
• How do we know the river? Where does our knowledge of the river come from, how do we enact this knowledge in our relationship to the water?
• How can we know the river with care?
• What are we going to do together? a set of rituals, asking permission of the river...

Who are the team and what do they bring?

• Lisa May Thomas (Centre for Sociodigital Futures, University of Bristol) is a computer scientist and contemporary dance artist who has worked extensively with body-technology relations in performance-making practices.
• Laurène Cheilan (Centre for Sociodigital Futures, University of Bristol) has a mixed professional background in performing arts, science museums, art/science/technology collaborations and interactive experiences for heritage. Their research is focused on public engagement in science and technology, more-than-human relationships of care, auto/ethnographical methods and interdisciplinary collaborations.
• Debbie Watson (Centre for Sociodigital Futures, University of Bristol) is a Professor in Child and Family Welfare and the Head of the Centre for Children and Families Research in the School for Policy Studies whose research focuses on understanding and improving the lives of children and young people, particularly those in adverse circumstances such as poverty and maltreatment. She utilises creative and sociomaterial approaches to research.
• Paul Clarke (Uninvited Guests / Theatre, University of Bristol) is a co-founder of Uninvited Guests and a practitioner-researcher, exploring the use of digital technologies in participatory and place-based performance, along with creative responds to archives.

What is to come?

This project will be a starting point to build relationships with existing and new partners (Defra, EA, RT), with experts (social science, humanities and arts researchers, river data scientists) and communities (wild swimmers, farmers whose land backs onto river borders, local homes and businesses close by…). This variety of perspectives will feed into a longer-term project to understand, explore and intervene in unsafe / inequitable/ non-inclusive / human-centred river futures across the sociodigital terrain.

This project will support the initial gathering of a reference group to enable/seed/grow a larger project around river futures, as part of CenSoF environments of care programme of research. The researchers intend to model their ideas / approaches / methods with this group, and to draw from other areas of expertise and practices in a physical /sensory /embodied and conversational exploration at the riverside to help them develop their methodology and co-design process as part of this larger project (incorporating partners, communities and researchers), which will take place in 2024. They also expect this work to lead into a further bid around a performance output.