Social Science Research Council

2007 DPDF Research Field:
Water Sustainability: Society, Politics, Culture

The field of “water sustainability” addresses the provision of water in relation to sustenance, health, collective life, distribution systems, political governance, and symbolic orders.  We focus on water as an instance and site of sustainable development, political ecology, and resource management but also as an object of historical inquiry, sociological investigation, and cultural interpretation.  Water sustainability thus brings together the textual readings of cultural studies and the quantitative approach of political science, the literary critic and the rational choice modeler in their shared study of the social, political, economic, and cultural frameworks through which water is provided, distributed, contested, and consumed.  

We concentrate on four key themes in the field:  Economic resources and human rights, water distribution and equity, the institutional economics and sociology of water, and debate and discourses of water sustainability.

The field thus engages a wide range of research methods. Since water is relatively new as an object of social science research, it is appropriate to pay close attention to the spatial, temporal and social scales of specific research topics. We seek student research projects that address water explicitly, though projects may emphasize different aspects (the physical materiality of water; its association with human and animal bodies and with plants; its use in economic production; its discursive and cultural representation; etc.).  Research topics may incorporate quantitative and qualitative research, though the specific combination will vary, and we will not exclude a priori proposals that rely exclusively on one or the other. The forms of evidence that students assemble may vary widely from case to case, and we will be attentive to the relations between evidence and research questions.