Living with Water

Charlotte Bates is a Senior Lecturer in Sociology at Cardiff UniversityKate Moles is a Reader in Sociology at Cardiff University

'This edited collection explores how living, thinking and writing with water can act as a vehicle for exploring emerging and persistent social and ecological issues. Structured around three aquatic themes – float, flow, submerge – the contributions are methodologically and textually diverse, including the creative arts, social sciences, history and ethnography, and encompassing a pleasing diversity of writing styles ranging from the personal and confessional to the figurative, theoretical and critical. As a reading experience, it is delightful.'Karen Throsby, author of Immersion: Marathon Swimming, Embodiment and Identity and Professor of Gender Studies, University of Leeds‘I love to surf, swim, dive, fish, and sit rugged up in a blanket with hot drink in hand just before plunging into icy winter sea. By diving into this beautifully polymorphous collection of emotional, intoxicating, playful, and daring storytelling you will be carried away by waves of analysis that will in turn alarm you, send shivers of joy across your skin, prompt deep introspection, and leave you with a deeply embodied sense of contentment. The collection is a flowing unity saturated with uncompromising reflexivity, care, and vulnerability that not only enriches thinking, listening, imagining, creating, feeling, and learning with water but perhaps, most importantly of all, a necessary responsibility to this giver of life.’Clifton Evers, Senior Lecturer in Media & Cultural Studies, Newcastle University'Living with Water: Everyday Encounters and Liquid Connections moves like the element it studies – fluid yet forceful, gentle yet transformative and connecting different streams of thought just as a river connects its tributaries. The collection brings together currents of sociology, anthropology, environmental studies and artistic practice and, like its subject, refuses to be contained within a single form. It flows through academic analysis, artistic intervention and personal narrative to reveal how water simultaneously shapes our physical environment, social relations, cultural practices and ways of thinking.'Ningxiang Sun, The Sociological Review

• Foreword – Jessica J. Lee1 Living with water – Kate Moles and Charlotte Bates 2 Jo¨kulsa´rlo´n 64°04'13''N 16°12'42''W – Wayne Binitie Float 3 Ryan and Alfie: the teenage fishers – Alys Tomlinson 4 Fereð ofer flodas: floating on a ferry – Eva McGrath5 Homes, happenings and everyday lives: afloat on London’s waterways – Lorna Flutter6 Bathed in feeling: water cultures and city life – Les Back 7 River crossings: the mighty London Thames – Sophie Watson 8 Living with/out water: media, memory and gender – Joanne Garde-HansenFlow9 How deep is your love? Spurting, surging, leaking and hissing in Calgary’s pressurised drinking water infrastructure – Becky Shaw10 Rain – Sans façon11 More than a body of water: disentangling the affective meshwork of the Belize Barrier Reef – Phillip Vannini and April Vannini12 Shifting tides: Anthropocene entanglements and unravellings in the Bay of Fundy – Aurora Fredriksen13 Follow the water – Perdita Phillips14 Glacial erratic – Stephanie KrzywonosSubmerge 15 17 bridges – Vanessa Daws 16 Churn – JLM Morton17 Submerging bodies in cold waters – Charlotte Bates and Kate Moles 18 How to swim without water: swimming as an ecological sensibility – Rebecca Olive 19 I just want an earth of cool mysteries – Samantha Walton20 Conjuring a swimming pond – Emily BatesIndex