18 October 2012, 4 pm
Peel Lecture Theatre, School of Geographical Sciences
Abstract:
The lecture explores the relationship between modernization, socio-environmental change and the choreographies of social and political power. The contested political-ecological process that marked the transformation of Spain’s hydro-social landscapes during the 20th century and into the new century will be the entry through which a wider set of issues will be explored. Modernization was and is a decidedly geographical project and is expressed in and through the intense socio-environmental transformation of Spain, both internally and in terms of its wider geo-political relations. This transformation is one in which water and the waterscape play a pivotal role. The broader intellectual objectives behind the articulation of the transformation of Spain’s hydro-social landscape between 1898 and 2008 are: 1) to explore how diverse political projects, social visions, ecological sensitivities, socio-cultural imaginaries, discursive formations, institutional arrangements, economic interests and strategies, and engineering technologies fuse together in particular environmental practices and hydro-technical infrastructures; 2) to document how human and non-human ‘actants’ become enrolled in this historical-geographical process of multi-scalar assembling; 3) to analyze the political ecological processes through which particular socio-technical configurations come into being, are stabilized, transformed, and ultimately replaced by other socio-technical assemblages; and 4) to tease out the implications of this reading for contemporary environmental politics.
Biography:
Erik Swyngedouw is Professor of Human Geography in the School of Environment and Development at the University of Manchester. His research interests include political-ecology, urban governance, democracy and political power, water and water resources, the political-economy of capitalist societies, and the politics of globalisation. Recent books include Urbanising Globalisation (co-edited, OUP 2003), Social Power and the Urbanisation of Water – Flows of Power (OUP 2004), and From Manufacturing Rivers to Desalting the Seas (MIT Press, forthcoming).