Hydropolitics: Making the Invisible Visible in the Storytelling of the Submerged (Thematic issue of the academic journal "Altre Modernità")
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Organization: Università degli Studi di Milano
Event: Thematic issue of the academic journal "Altre Modernità"
This issue explores storytelling as a discursive practice that reimagines underground waterscapes imaginaries. In an era of rapid urbanisation, overextraction, and environmental degradation, attention to the subterranean is no longer optional but critical—both imaginatively and materially. Groundwater already supports the livelihoods of more than 1 billion urban residents in Asia and 150 million in Latin America, including those in megacities such as Beijing, Jakarta, and Mexico City, yet it remains underacknowledged and increasingly imperilled (British Geological Survey 2). Across Europe, over 15% of mapped aquifers are classified as overexploited or contaminated, representing 26% of aquifer surface area (Sentek et al.). However, these underground realms—ancient springs, labyrinthine urban infrastructures, deep waters—are simultaneously vital for ecological survival and cultural life, layered with memories of human lives and actions.
Groundwater narratives not only operate as critiques of the status quo, exposing entrenched binary oppositions and systemic exclusions, but also enact de-centring shifts that reposition hydrogeology and groundwater as co-constituent parts of the same story, where “the very nature of matter and the very matter of nature [are iteratively re-]constituted through a multiplicity of force relations” (Barad 110). Far from being a marginal substance, groundwater is a complex three-dimensional environment, an intra-active relationality between water and ground: one upon which human societies rely for multiple aspects of life, but which does not exist solely for anthropocentric ends. Moreover, to conceptualize groundwater as a series of aquifers requires recalling the very definition of an aquifer as subjective and temporary—merely the point at which the accessibility and availability of groundwater become useful for specific purposes in specific locations (Waltz).
Groundwater both produces and is reproduced in narrative, representational, and visual cultures. Its research and dissemination are often framed as “making the invisible visible”, wherein the “invisible and capricious nature of groundwater” (Nilekani; Powis 92) highlights the epistemic and methodological challenges inherent to its study. Rarely measured directly, groundwater is inferred through signs, responses, and patterns—echoing H.B.N. Hynes’s classic observation that rivers are manifestations of the landscapes they drain (Hynes). For instance, urban groundwater, in this sense, operates as a reciprocal archive of urban development, though defined by continuity, contamination, and the impossibility of isolating discrete elements. To an extent, it is less an archive than a “ruin” (Bryant): a congregation of matter simultaneously legible and distorted, offering a way of thinking by constantly challenging human attempts at representation. These qualities are not exclusive to groundwater, nor is it the only domain of science confronted with difficulties of measurement. The “technical difficulties associated with sampling the underground aquatic environment” parallel the broader “methodological challenge that some of the most interesting Anthropocene science poses to geology” (Powis 93; Ahuja). This makes groundwater a privileged case study for rethinking both scientific practice, Environmental Humanities, and the epistemological foundations of how we engage with what stands beneath the surface.
To think with groundwater, then, requires openness to multispecies and non-human perspectives, to what Reinert calls “geological conviviality”: the specific and complex ways in which geologic existences intersect with humans and non-human beings. Conceiving groundwater as an active element of our life aligns with arguments for the “epistemic, physical, technical, and conceptual” importance of subterranean spaces as sites of multidisciplinary inquiry in the Anthropocene (Melo Zurita et al. 299), and with calls for the necessarily difficult practice of “voluminous” thinking (Steinberg and Peters 248). Much existing work in Environmental Humanities, science and technology studies, and political ecology has focussed on extractive industries (fuels, minerals, water) and the contestations surrounding sites of extraction (Bebbington; Kinchy et al.), or explored the imaginative, literary, and cultural representations of the underground enabled by new technologies of extraction and investigation (Williams). In addition to existing work, this issue centralises underground waters as a site of inquiry in themselves—one that matters not only when drilled, mapped, or extracted, but as a vibrant medium that continually reshapes, and is reshaped by, the socio-material and narrative worlds it inhabits.
Indeed, environmental justice concerns are inseparable from the study of groundwater, as exploitative and spoliative practices extend beneath the surface, such as deep mining, the political control of sewerage systems, and the extraction of resources within enmeshed human and non-human ecosystems underground (Loftus).
These practices foreground a politics of verticality—both physically, in terms of the stratification and depth of subterranean environments, and temporally, in relation to the layered histories of extraction, contamination, and dispossession inscribed across geological and anthropic time. Thinking with verticality reveals how struggles over subterranean waters intersect with questions of justice, access, and ecological reciprocity.
The urgency of attending to underground waters today lies in their dual contingency: they are at once contemporary—immediately implicated in urban planning, infrastructural politics, and planetary-scale hydropolitics (Wojnarowski 4-21)—and diachronic, as they bear traces of historical trajectories of industrialization, colonization, and anthropogenic transformation.
We invite a reconceptualisation of subterranean domains as fundamentally palimpsestic. Drawing on Sarah Dillon’s theorisation of the palimpsest as both material and conceptual figure, whose significance lies in its “palimpsestuousness”—that is, its structure of interlayered inscriptions and erasures (Dillon 6-7), we highlight aquifers, expanses of water, and urban grounds as hydrosocial and hydropolitical palimpsests.
These are bodies shaped by geological time, yet continually overwritten by centuries of engineering, exploitation, and urban development. They are also cultural repositories, composed of fragments of stories and material residues cast aside as disposable. Verticality here functions as a hierarchical force that determines what is preserved and what is discarded, leaving unwanted matter as remnants of an erased past. Yet, as groundwater rises, it unsettles these hierarchies, bringing hidden fragments to the surface. What once appeared as mere debris—flotsam and jetsam—returns as valuable testimony, igniting the arduous but essential process of remembrance.
Destabilizing conventional hierarchies of remembrance and value, this take on verticality offers new cartographies for inhabiting memory, identity, and belonging. To speak of groundwater today, whether in its ‘natural’ form or as part of highly engineered urban environments, is to acknowledge its critical centrality: as a resource, as a medium of ecological interdependence, and as a dynamic archive of both continuity and disruption in inhuman and human-nonhuman relations.
By foregrounding underground waterscapes as cultural as well as ecological terrains, we invite contributors to explore how storytelling practices make visible the precarious, layered, and contested realities of these submerged domains. We focus on instances of storytelling across media—including literary, journalistic, filmic, musical, visual, and multimodal forms— since the Twentieth century to contemporaneity without any geographical limitations, while understanding ‘text’ in the broad sense established in Cultural Studies, where cultural artefacts are read as discursive practices. Such an expansive conception allows us to examine how diverse cultural forms articulate and investigate the complexity of subterranean waters.
Considered lines of inquiry and discussion points include:
the negotiations with the past and the palimpsestic quality of memory in the narratives of subterranean waters;
the analysis of the imaginaries of groundwaters through the framework of the Environmental Humanities and the notion of environmental justice;
the deconstruction of ideologically biased narratives and the identification of excentric perspectives that can challenge dominant power structures and suggest new directions for the future;
groundwaters as liminal spaces that transcend temporal and spatial boundaries, serving as and/or becoming sites of trauma but also of resistance and transformation;
the role of water imagery in representing the repressed remembrances and experiences of marginalized people, and the mechanisms through which these memories resurface;
the intersection of the personal and the political in underground waters narratives, that is, the investigation of how personal experiences and collective histories are intertwined in narratives centred on groundwater.
The list of topics abovementioned is not meant to be exhaustive and the Scientific Committee will consider other proposals submitted by scholars who intend to collaborate in the issue of the journal, with a view to expand the investigation of the area with articulate and original research.
If you wish to contribute to Other Modernities issue 37, you are kindly required to submit an abstract (max 200 words) alongside a short CV to the email address amonline@unimi.it, by 30 April 2026
The complete contribution will have to be submitted by 1 September 2026.
Other Modernities accepts contributions in Italian, Spanish, French and English.
The issue will be published by the end of May 2027.
We also welcome book reviews and interviews to authors and scholars who investigate the aforementioned topics.
Moreover, Other Modernities will also consider publishing non-thematic essays in the indexed section “Off the Record”, following the conditions and deadlines indicated for thematic essays in this Call for Papers.
Contributors should feel free to contact the editors to discuss and clarify the objectives of their proposals, with a view to making the issue as homogeneous as possible also from a methodological point of view. The editors can be contacted via the Editorial Board (amonline@unimi.it).
Works Cited
Ahuja, Neel. “The Anthropocene Debate: On the Limits of Colonial Geology.” Neel Ahuja, 9 Sept. 2016, ahuja.sites.ucsc.edu/2016/09/09/the-anthropocene-debate-on-the-limits-of-colonial-geology/. Accessed 27 Sept. 2025.
Barad, Karen. “No Small Matter: Mushroom Clouds, Ecologies of Nothingness, and Strange Topologies of Spacetimemattering.” Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet, edited by Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing et al., University of Minnesota Press, 2017, pp. 103-120.
Bebbington, Anthony. “Underground Political Ecologies: The Second Annual Lecture of the Cultural and Political Ecology Specialty Group of the Association of American Geographers.” Geoforum, vol. 43, no. 6, 2012, pp. 1152-1162.
British Geological Survey. Groundwater Fact Sheet: The Impact of Urbanisation. 2007, www2.bgs.ac.uk/groundwater/downloads/themes_sheets/Urbanisation.pdf. Accessed 27 Sept. 2025.
Bryant, Levi R. “Ruins and Post-Correlationist Thoughts.” Larval Subjects, 10 Aug. 2018, https://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2018/08/10/ruins-and-post-correlationist-thought/. Accessed 27 Sept. 2025.
Dillon, Sarah. The Palimpsest: Literature, Criticism, Theory. Continuum, 2007.
Hynes, H.B.N. “The Stream and Its Valley.” SIL Proceedings, 1922–2010, vol. 19, no. 1, 1975, pp. 1-15.
Kinchy, Abby J., et al. “Engaging the Underground: An STS Field in Formation.” Engaging Science, Technology, and Society, vol. 4, 2018, pp. 22-42.
Loftus, Alex. “Rethinking Political Ecologies of Water.” Third World Quarterly, vol. 30, no. 5, 2009, pp. 953-968.
Melo Zurita, María, et al. “Un-Earthing the Subterranean Anthropocene.” Area, vol. 50, no. 3, 2018, pp. 298-305.
Nilekani, Rohini. “Rohini Nilekani Dreams of Making Invisible Water Visible.” Mint, 19 May 2018, www.livemint.com/Leisure/7ztndZVQNjFd9HVtfn9vnI/Rohini-Nilekani--Making-invisible-water-visible.html. Accessed 27 Sept. 2025.
Powis, Anthony. “The Relational Materiality of Groundwater.” GeoHumanities, vol. 7, no. 1, 2021, pp. 89-112.
Reinert, Hugo. “About a Stone: Some Notes on Geological Conviviality.” Environmental Humanities, vol. 8, no. 1, 2016, pp. 95-117.
Sentek, Zeynep, et al. “Under the Surface: The Hidden Crisis in Europe’s Groundwater.” European Waters, 15 May 2024, https://europeanwaters.eu/. Accessed 27 Sept. 2025.
Steinberg, Philip, and Kimberley Peters. “Wet Ontologies, Fluid Spaces: Giving Depth to Volume through Oceanic Thinking.” Environment and Planning D: Society & Space, vol. 33, no. 2, 2015, pp. 247-264.
Waltz, John P. “Ground Water.” Introduction to Physical Hydrology, edited by Richard J. Chorley, Methuen & Co Ltd, 1969, pp. 122-130.
Williams, Rosalind. Notes from the Underground: An Essay on Technology, Society, and the Imagination. MIT Press, 1990.
Wojnarowski, Frederick. “Contested Flows: An Ethnographic Contribution to Narratives of Groundwater Over Abstraction in the Central Jordanian Highlands.” Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, vol. 0, no. 0, 2025, pp. 1-26. [online first]
https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/AMonline/callforpapers
Elena Ogliari