PoWG co-director Leila Harris has contributed a chapter to a new book on the ‘politics of fresh water’, exploring the intersection of gender, ethnic difference, and equality in water access and politics. The edited collection forms part of EarthScan’s Studies in Water Resources Management book series. It will be released in December 2016, and is currently available for pre-order.
Harris, L. (in press) Theorizing Gender, Ethnic Difference and Inequality in Relation to Water Access and Politics in Southeastern Turkey. In: C. Ashcraft and T. Mayer (Eds) The Politics of Freshwater: Access, Conflict and Identity, Routledge, Earthscan.
Dr Harris’ chapter makes two assertions. First, one cannot assess, and fully understand the politics of fresh water without attention to inequality, notably with respect to gender and other axes of difference. Second, water access and politics often play a central role in constituting key categories of difference and inequality. As such, these categories are not static, but shift and change in relation to the changing waterscape and associated environmental dynamics. This chapter elaborates these assertions with examples based on earlier work examining complex waterscape changes underway in the upper Tigris-Euphrates basin, also highlighting key concepts from several decades of work in feminist political ecology.
A pre-publication version of Dr Harris’ chapter is also available here.