Everyday Practices, Everyday Water: From Foucault to Rivera-Cusicanqui (with a Few Stops in between)

Abstract

In this article, we explore elements of the literature on practices and the everyday to provide reference points for water researchers. We cast a wide net in recognition of the complex and multifaceted nature of human relationships to water that cannot be reduced to a single perspective. The article begins with the work of prominent French theorists including Foucault, Lefebvre, Bourdieu and de Certeau. Each grapples with the interrelationship between wider socio-political processes and practice in different ways. This leads us to pragmatism and non-representational theory in the second section, which argue that to understand socio-political processes, one must begin from practices. In the third section, we engage with work on practices in conditions of instability and precarity, which are widespread under contemporary conditions of post-colonial neoliberalism, and the role of “care” in mitigating their effects. In section four, we discuss the scholarship and practice of Silvia Rivera-Cusicanqui, who explores and extends many of the approaches elaborated above. The article concludes with a reflection on what this means for engaging with the multiple realities and ways of living with water.

Unpacking everyday urbanism: Practices and the making of (un)even urban waterscapes

“…A scrutiny of the practices of social actors and their effects is also central to explanations of the recursive relationship between individual agency and the reproduction or transformation of social orders (Bourdieu, 1977;Giddens, 1984). As also noted elsewhere (see Furlong et al, 2019;Rasche & Chia, 2009), in Foucault practices are tied to and reflect broader patterns power and knowledge, while in Bourdieu they are historically contingent and embedded in a given social context and in de Certeau they are conceptualized as sites of resistance. While social constructivist approaches emphasize the knowledge orders and mental constructs which inform human action, practice approaches shift the focus more centrally onto material human doings.…”

“…The way these practices constitute the everyday and what practices are constituted of is, however, largely unquestioned. In other words, the constitutive parts of the everyday can be further unpacked to analyze urban transformations and the “universe of practices,” which constitute the landscape of water governance (Furlong et al, 2019; Peloso & Morinville, 2014).…”

Towards A Ch’ixi Fashion: Building Sustainable Futures In The Present

“…And this is a radical framework, because it does not try to reduce opposites to mere passive objects, as is the case with the extractive view of colonial capitalism, rendering people and the environment as things to own. sustainability, as the spaces where "we seek to 'weave' rather than to resolve" (Furlong et al, 2019(Furlong et al, , p. 2046) the differences we encounter.…”

The project, the everyday, and reflexivity in sociotechnical agri-food assemblages: proposing a conceptual model of digitalisation

“…However, the everyday is not limited to the micro level of intimate relations between actors and technologies. As highlighted by Furlong et al ( 2019 ), the idea of the everyday is made up of interplays between macro social relations and structures, and micro practices and daily tactics.…”