<b>Amphibious Worlds: Environments, Infrastructures, Ontologies</b>

Abstract

Presently, we are witness to a global intensification of water-related disasters related to flooding, sinking erosion, and drought, reflecting changes in global water circulation, rising sea levels and changing weather patterns. Indeed, water is often the medium through which the message of climate change is delivered. Conventionally, water-related engineering projects have managed amphibious spaces through terrestrial approaches premised on removing or controlling water, for example by land reclamation and drainage. They can be contrasted with amphibious approaches that take water flows as a given and organize life around it--as exemplified by living in floating villages or houses on stilts, using water as a primary mode of transportation, or growing crops in water. Yet, the amphibious is gaining new life, as water seems to be increasingly flowing back into land, everywhere giving rise to emergencies that call for creative response. Thus, urban planners, engineers, and architects devise new infrastructures and models adaptive to environments that are becoming amphibious once again, or for the first time, and people living in watery environments everywhere find ways of adapting to increasingly amphibious circumstances. Doing so, they are contributing to the ongoing ontological transformation of amphibious worlds. This introduction to the thematic collection on "Amphibious Worlds: Environments, Infrastructures, Ontologies," outlines some of the key issues facing STS and anthropological studies of such worlds, and introduces the papers that follow.

The treadmill of protection: How public finance constrains climate adaptation

“…It means adjusting conceptions of what constitutes "protection" and developing new expectations of coastal living. It follows similar calls for "amphibious" policy approaches (Jensen, 2017), where public spending focuses on what prominent New Orleans architect and planner David Waggonner calls "living with water," rather than against it (Waggonner and Ball, 2010). Amphibious thinking recognizes vulnerability as a persistent quality of coastal zones, as opposed to something that can be designed away (Wakefield, 2019b).…”

The past, present, and future of underwater spaces: From tourist experiences to the possibility of habitation

“…As this body literature continues to evolve, research will likely veer away from additional explorations of divers and diving tourism, and toward novel experiences and practices which will reveal the fully post‐human and more‐than‐human dimensions of living with—not under or below, but actually with —water, oceanic and otherwise. These new aqueous and arguably “amphibian” geographies (on amphibian anthropologies see Jensen, 2017; Krause, 2017) will shift empirical attention, agendas, and even ontologies further away from humanist discourses and further toward a full realization of a hybrid terrestrial‐watery existence. As Picken and Ferguson (2014) insightfully argue, this new condition of life will rely on new assemblages of science, technology, and oceanic nature resulting in the formation of hybrid bodies that are technologically stripped of their humanist core, and existing “in the dangerous, risky, and thrilling condition of ultimate dependency” (2014, p. 329).…”

A multiplicity ofprek(s): Enacting a socionatural mosaic in the Cambodian upper Mekong delta

“…The disappearance of a passive object in the middle has implications for water studies (Barnes and Alatout, 2012; Jensen, 2017). Water is not “ultimately” a physical flow, but it can be enacted as such in some practices.…”