River(s) Wear: Water in the Expanded Field

Santos, Miguel; Wainwright, John

doi:10.1177/14744740241233699

River(s) Wear: Water in the Expanded Field

Santos, Miguel; Wainwright, John

Authors

Miguel Santos

Professor John Wainwright john.wainwright@durham.ac.uk
Professor

Abstract

This article elaborates on an artist-in-residence project funded by the Leverhulme Trust in the Geography Department at Durham University in 2015–16. The project confronted artistic and scientific perspectives to investigate how people in the North-East of England perceive and value their river environments and to recognize potential contributions to catchment management. The project identified a variety of disconnexions and hierarchies in the River Wear catchment and formulated artistic interventions for nonhuman audiences. This article reflects on water holistically and explores transdisciplinary views to propose water in its expanded field. Water in the Expanded Field is plural, complex, and aims at decentering the human importance. It promotes water multiple perspectives, including the more-than-human world and acknowledging water’s ontological importance, developed by the speculative artistic practice of producing works of art for nonhuman audiences and then transposed to water debates. The article converges distinct evidence pointing to the importance of composting existing knowledge and dualistic reasoning to promote pluriversal ontologies of water.

Citation

Santos, M., & Wainwright, J. (2024). River(s) Wear: Water in the Expanded Field. Cultural Geographies, 31(4), 447-471. https://doi.org/10.1177/14744740241233699

Journal Article Type	Article
Acceptance Date	Jan 21, 2024
Online Publication Date	Feb 21, 2024
Publication Date	2024-10
Deposit Date	May 29, 2024
Publicly Available Date	May 29, 2024
Journal	cultural geographies
Print ISSN	1474-4740
Electronic ISSN	1477-0881
Publisher	SAGE Publications
Peer Reviewed	Peer Reviewed
Volume	31
Issue	4
Pages	447-471
DOI	https://doi.org/10.1177/14744740241233699
Keywords	pluriversal, River Wear, speculative, more-than-human, art for nonhumans, art and science, posthumanism, water
Public URL	https://durham-repository.worktribe.com/output/2466952

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Copyright Statement
© The Author(s) 2024
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) which permits any use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the SAGE and Open Access pages (https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage).