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Explores how animated water, rivers and dams can be used to frame language, southern multilingualisms and to develop pedagogies
This book explores how water functions as both a material reality and an epistemological metaphor for rethinking knowledge production from decolonial and Global South perspectives.
It brings together scholars from diverse disciplines to examine how water – rivers, oceans, rain and aquatic cosmologies – shapes ways of knowing, remembering and relating to the environment. The chapters critically interrogate dominant Western epistemologies and foreground Southern and decolonial epistemologies.
The book seeks to recover marginalized knowledge traditions and challenge dominant academic Eurocentric frameworks proposing water as a generative site for reimagining knowledge production.
It contributes to ongoing debates in decolonial studies, environmental humanities, education and African studies, offering new metaphors, methodologies and paths towards solidarity and collaboration.
The Global South is here subjected to water, disappearing as a colonial place of violence and presented anew in the fluidity and emergence of a decolonial corriente capable of projecting Northern futures. By focusing on the energy of wild rivers and the spiritual, physical and cultural nature of water, this volume’s fluid ways of knowing wash away colonial epistemologies including static understandings of language and literacy.
This collection dares readers to break free from the terra-centric box, redirecting their analytical gaze to water as epistemology and method. Readers may feel unmoored at first – rethinking one's whole conceptual apparatus is never comfortable. But that unsettling is the gift: the thrilling price of accepting to push past the limits of thought itself and be in the world.
Susan Wairimu Mahachi is an independent scholar and educational consultant with a PhD from Pennsylvania State University, USA. Her research centers on educational theories that seek to create pluriversal learning spaces—spaces that recognize and engage diverse epistemologies while supporting students’ conceptual thinking in science education.
Sinfree Makoni is Liberal Arts Professor of Africana Studies and the inaugural Head of the Department of Africana Studies at Pennsylvania State University, USA.
Phoebe Quaynor is Assistant Teaching Professor in the College of Education, Department of Curriculum and Instruction, Pennsylvania State University, USA.
Foreword. Ashraf Abdelhay: Water: A Decolonial Sociolinguistic Heuristic
Introduction. Sinfree Makoni, Susan Wairimu Mahachi, Mama Nii-Owoo Adobea, and Loreen Marata: “It Is Precisely Dangerous and Wild Aspects of Rivers That Makes Them Good to Think With”: Reflections on Decolonial Thinking About Language Using Riverine Sociolinguistics and Water Grammars
Chapter 1. Comfort Azubuko-Udah: Storying Piped and Domestic Water in Nigerian Literature
Chapter 2. Charne Lavery: The Southern Indian Ocean and the Oceanic South
Chapter 3. Isabel Hofmeyr: Dockside Reading: Hydrocolonialism and the Custom House
Chapter 4. Sarah Nuttall: On Pluviality: Rain as Method
Chapter 5. Bonnie McElhinny and Sinfree Makoni: Once Upon a River: A Conversation About Water, Water Epistemologies, and Language
Chapter 6. Sybil Diver: Social Impact Assessment of Klamath Dam Removal: Learning from the Karuk Tribe’s Leadership for Eco-Cultural Revitalization
Chapter 7. Priya Parrotta: From Archives to Soundscapes: Integrating Historiography, Music and Environmental Consciousness in Courses on Tropical Islands
Chapter 8. Lucia Thesen: Knowledge-Making from A Postgraduate Writers’ Circle: A Southern Reflectory
Afterword. Tommaso Milani: Ways of Water: Politics, Pedagogy, Epistemology