Seminar 2

Date: February 24, 2014

Time: 1pm – 2.15pm

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

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

Paper title: Water Futures: Resilience thinking, biosociality and Complex Adaptive Systems Theory

Paper abstract: This paper maps the confluence of relations between the natural capital of the aquatic world and the socio-psycho-cultural capital of the human world, as part of the Maussian (1934) notion of assemblages. In such relations the self-organisation of aquatic environments is engaged in an ongoing process of entanglement and adaptation in parallel with adaptations in human understandings and approaches to water. This paper borrows from Complex Adaptive Systems Theory (CAS) to imagine new streams of behaviour and management,  that might treat the ubiquitous river more sustainably. My research explores cross-currents in sustainability logic, socio-cultural connectivity, adaptive capacity (of the human and the natural), and broader water values that exist beyond the containment of the current commodification paradigm. By combining the methods of resilience thinking, and CAS this paper imagines a more balanced measure between economic, ecological, customary and recreational values of water. As Groenfeldt and Schmidt have argued, ‘without values, governance has no referent for adjudicating competing demands’ (2013). By considering water as part of a complex adaptive stream of intra and inter relationships, this research champions waters’ multi-dimensional capacity and agency by advancing concepts of resilience thinking, ‘cross-cultural water literacy’ (Hawke 2012) and biosocial relations towards more coherent and multi-valued water futures