Water Matters: thinking with water Class Experience

Abstract

This article revisits a co-learning experience of a graduate course on the political ecology of water at the Master’s program in Development Studies in a Colombian private university which employed a thinking with water teaching methodology based on the ontological-epistemological-methodological unity. Water as a nearly universal solvent not only conditions life on the planet but also defines human imaginary. The physical characteristics of water such as its fluidity, plasticity, and conductivity enable a multidimensional, nonlineal, and relational thought. Because of its universal familiarity and its indispensability for life, water offers intuitive ways of knowing. The revision of the class experience showed that the materiality of water affects the dynamic of the course. It supports the idea of the performativity (Barad) of our knowledge about Self and the world. Spontaneous and resistant, water clears hidden, silenced, or ignored meanings of both social and environmental relations and, so, stimulates critical self-reflection, catalyzes social change, and promotes social justice.