Living with water brings together sociologists, geographers, artists, writers and poets to explore the ways in which water binds, immerses and supports us. Drawing from international research on river crossings, boat dwelling, wild swimming, sea fishing, and drought impacts, and navigating urban waters, glacial lagoons, barrier reefs and disappearing tarns, the collection illuminates the ways that we live with and without water, and explores how we can think and write with water on land. Water offers a way of attending to emerging and enduring social and ecological concerns and making sense of them in lively and creative ways. By approaching Living with water from different disciplinary and methodological perspectives, and drawing on research from around the world, this collection opens up discussions that reinvigorate and renew previously landlocked debates.

This book is relevant to United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 6, Clean water and sanitation

Reviews

'This edited collection explores how living, thinking and writing with water can act as a vehicle for exploring emerging and persistent social and ecological issues. Structured around three aquatic themes - float, flow, submerge - the contributions are methodologically and textually diverse, including the creative arts, social sciences, history and ethnography, and encompassing a pleasing diversity of writing styles ranging from the personal and confessional to the figurative, theoretical and critical. As a reading experience, it is delightful.'
Karen Throsby, author of Immersion: Marathon Swimming, Embodiment and Identity and Professor of Gender Studies, University of Leeds

'I love to surf, swim, dive, fish, and sit rugged up in a blanket with hot drink in hand just before plunging into icy winter sea. By diving into this beautifully polymorphous collection of emotional, intoxicating, playful, and daring storytelling you will be carried away by waves of analysis that will in turn alarm you, send shivers of joy across your skin, prompt deep introspection, and leave you with a deeply embodied sense of contentment. The collection is a flowing unity saturated with uncompromising reflexivity, care, and vulnerability that not only enriches thinking, listening, imagining, creating, feeling, and learning with water but perhaps, most importantly of all, a necessary responsibility to this giver of life.'
Clifton Evers, Senior Lecturer in Media & Cultural Studies, Newcastle University

Foreword - Jessica J. Lee
1 Living with water - Kate Moles and Charlotte Bates
2 Jo¨kulsa´rlo´n 64°04'13''N 16°12'42''W - Wayne Binitie

Float
3 Ryan and Alfie: the teenage fishers - Alys Tomlinson
4 Fereð ofer flodas: floating on a ferry - Eva McGrath
5 Homes, happenings and everyday lives: afloat on London's waterways - Lorna Flutter
6 Bathed in feeling: water cultures and city life - Les Back
7 River crossings: the mighty London Thames - Sophie Watson
8 Living with/out water: media, memory and gender - Joanne Garde-Hansen

Flow
9 How deep is your love? Spurting, surging, leaking and hissing in Calgary's pressurised drinking water infrastructure - Becky Shaw
10 Rain - Sans façon
11 More than a body of water: disentangling the affective meshwork of the Belize Barrier Reef - Phillip Vannini and April Vannini
12 Shifting tides: Anthropocene entanglements and unravellings in the Bay of Fundy - Aurora Fredriksen
13 Follow the water - Perdita Phillips
14 Glacial erratic - Stephanie Krzywonos

Submerge
15 17 bridges - Vanessa Daws
16 Churn - JLM Morton
17 Submerging bodies in cold waters - Charlotte Bates and Kate Moles
18 How to swim without water: swimming as an ecological sensibility - Rebecca Olive
19 I just want an earth of cool mysteries - Samantha Walton
20 Conjuring a swimming pond - Emily Bates

Index