Room 2175, Level 2, Haydon-Allen Building, The Australian National University

Dr Shé Hawke, Lecturer, School of Sociology, Research School of Social Sciences, College of Arts and Social Sciences, The Australian National University

This paper attempts to re-make water (aquapoiesis) in the public imaginary by hailing it as both field and agent in its own becoming, acted upon by other agents, whose habitus and sense of cultural, symbolic and natural capital is as various as the flows of water itself. The river (specifically the Cotter River) is located as part of webs of relation with humans and non-humans, and within its own flows. By mapping the river through an ‘aqueous narrative cartography’ or River Yarning (Moggridge 2013) this paper sets Bourdieu’s (1977) tripartite schema of habitus , field and agency, to a new purpose through an analysis of his social, symbolic and natural capitals, and offers a fresh reading of water and its flow-on affects. Complex Adaptive Systems theory is obliquely embedded in this discussion as a motif for biosocial webs of relation, along with the broad intentions of actor/network theory, and specifically through Latour’s particular uptake that re-constitutes objects (in this case the river) as subjects and actants, through his and Wheeler’s (2012) and Salleh’s (2011) application of narrative and biosemiosis.