How Deep is Your Love? Spurting, surging, leaking and hissing in Calgary’s pressurised drinking water infrastructure.

Living with Water edited by Kate Moles and Charlotte Bates 150 word catalogue entry Living with Water brings together sociologists, anthropologists, geographers, artists and poets to explore the ways in which water binds, immerses and supports us. Drawing from international research on river crossings, boat dwelling, wild swimming, sea fishing, and draught impacts, and navigating urban waters, glacial lagoons, barrier reefs and underground rivers, the collection illuminates the ways that we live with and without water, and explores how we can think and write with water on land. Water offers a way of attending to emerging and enduring social and ecological concerns and making sense of them in lively and creative ways. By approaching Living with Water from different disciplinary and methodological perspectives, and drawing on research from around the world, this collection opens up discussions that reinvigorate and renew previously landlocked debates. Scope and content Living with Water explores water as a potent part of our lives; a social, cultural and material object and subject, ubiquitous and contested, that is both an environmental resource and risk. Our authors trace the ways water flows through, shapes and is shaped by our everyday lives in both infra- and extra-ordinary moments, touching on the intimate, social, political and symbolic relationships we have with it. Water is followed through the stories we tell, the places we live and go, and the ways we remember and forget. By presenting empirical and theoretical discussions of these social relations, we draw attention to different socialities, ways of knowing ourselves and understanding the world we live in. The chapters come together to develop and advance sociological arguments around how social worlds are produced and sustained, how this is accomplished in different places and in different ways and how water enables and supports social life. The ways we interact with each other, with the natural world and with such a precious symbolic and physical resource allow us to explore key moments in the fluid and ongoing dynamics of our social world. The cases we draw on are internationally diverse and socially disparate, but the core argument running through all the chapters encourages us to think about the multiple, diverse but always significant ways in which water is part of our everyday lives. Our contributions are both academic and artistic, highlighting our belief in the important contributions various mediums can make to the arguments and understanding we are advancing. Our methodology is qualitative and largely ethnographic, bringing the ways people make sense of water in their 3 lives and locales to the fore. It is here that our contribution to the field is most apparent; we draw our reader’s attention to the ways in which people live with water variously, mundanely and extraordinarily. Moving beyond the more common focus on water as a space of leisure or wellbeing, this collection highlights the ways in which water is an irreducible part of the lives we live. To understand the social worlds we inhabit, we must duly attend to its watery components. Selling points • This book draws our attention to the most ubiquitous material on the planet, but one that is often overlooked in our understanding of everyday social life: water. Our authors discuss how paying attention to the practices and processes water flows through allows us to revitalise the ways we understand the world more broadly. • The collection brings together sociologists, anthropologists, geographers, artists and poets, crossing disciplinary boundaries to advance an interdisciplinary understanding of the ways in which we live and think with water. • The collection presents contributions that rework the general structure of a traditional academic book, drawing insights from art and poetry to reframe and revitalise our sociological imagination. List of contributors Les Back is a Professor in the Sociology Department, Goldsmiths, UK. Charlotte Bates is a Lecturer at the School of Social Sciences, Cardiff University, UK. Wayne Binite is an artist and PhD student at the Royal College of Art, UK. Vanessa Daws is a visual artist and long distance swimmer based in Dublin, Ireland. Lorna Flutter is a PhD student at the School of Social Sciences, Cardiff University, UK. Aurora Fredriksen is a Lecturer in Human Geography, University of Manchester, UK. Joanne Garde-Hansen is a Reader in Culture, Media and Communication, University of Warwick, UK. Safet HadžiMuhamedović is a Research Associate at the University of Cambridge and a Senior Teaching Fellow in Anthropology at SOAS, UK. Eva McGrath is a Research Fellow in the Human Geography Department, University of Plymouth, UK. Kate Moles is a Lecturer at the School of Social Sciences, Cardiff University, UK. JLM Morton is Poet in Residence at Waterland, Cotswold Water Park, UK. Rebecca Olive is a Senior Research Fellow in the School of Human Movement and Nutrition Sciences, The University of Queensland, Australia. Perdita Phillips is a contemporary artist based in Australia. Becky Shaw is an artist based in London, UK and Reader in Fine Art at Sheffield Hallam University. Alys Tomlinson is a documentary photographer based in London, UK. Phillip Vannini and April Vannini Phillip is a Professor in the School of Communication and Culture, Royal Road University, Canada, and April is a non-disciplinary researcher and artist. Samantha Walton is a poet and Reader in Modern Literature, Bath Spa University, UK. Sophie Watson is a Professor at the School of Sociology, The Open University, UK.