Margreet Zwarteveen

The project is premised on the realization that growing pressures on the environment – and the resulting pollutions, scarcities, and depletions – are not natural processes but the outcome of specific histories and practices of exploitation or ‘development’. The search for more sustainable futures, therefore, entails critically questioning these, as well as the science and technologies that help make them possible.

Focusing on water-related problems, I propose experimenting with new transdisciplinary approaches that straddle many of the binaries – between nature and culture, modernity and tradition, reason and emotion, etc. – to explore their potential for sparking new conversations and imaginaries. Realizing more sustainable futures also requires identifying new meeting grounds for “thinkers” (often critical social scientists) who look at the past and sift through evidence, and “doers” who look ahead to build, make or implement (often planners and engineers).

In the project I intend to help create these meeting grounds through collaborative projects that are based on the insistence that learning – and the generation of knowledge – is always situated in specific practices. Shifting the discussion from ‘what is true’ to ‘what works’, or so I hope, will make the conversation more pragmatic and modest as well as more explicitly political.