TY - JOUR
T1 - Suffering for water, suffering from water
T2 - Emotional geographies of resource access, control and conflict
AU - Sultana, Farhana
N1 - Funding Information:
I would like to thank Becky Elmhirst for inviting me to submit this article and for feedback that helped focus the argument. Many thanks also to Katie Willis, Andrea Nightingale, and the three anonymous referees for insightful suggestions and comments. I would also like to gratefully acknowledge funding from the following sources that made possible the research described in this article: MacArthur Foundation, University of Minnesota, International Water Management Institute, and the Department for International Development (UK). Particular thanks to the hundreds of people in the many villages of Bangladesh who shared their lives and realities with me. All limitations in the article remain mine.
PY - 2011/3
Y1 - 2011/3
N2 - This article argues that resource access, use, control, ownership and conflict are not only mediated through social relations of power, but also through emotional geographies where gendered subjectivities and embodied emotions constitute how nature-society relations are lived and experienced on a daily basis. By engaging the insights from feminist political ecology literatures and emotional geographies literatures, the article demonstrates that resource struggles and conflicts are not just material challenges but emotional ones, which are mediated through bodies, spaces and emotions. Such a focus fleshes out the complexities, entanglements and messy relations that constitute political ecologies of resources management, where practices and processes are negotiated through constructions of gender, embodiments, and emotions. Abstractions of 'resource struggles' and 'resource conflicts' are thereby grounded in embodied emotional geographies of places, peoples, and resources, enabling us to better understand the ways resources and emotions come to matter in everyday survival struggles. This framing can enrich feminist political ecology theorizations and texture our understandings of commonly-used terms such as access, use, control, conflict and struggles vis-à-vis natural resources in any context. In other words, we are better able to conceptualize and explain how and why people access, use, and struggle over resources the ways they do. A case study of drinking water contamination from Bangladesh is used to develop the theoretical arguments in contributing to existing debates in (feminist) political ecologies.
AB - This article argues that resource access, use, control, ownership and conflict are not only mediated through social relations of power, but also through emotional geographies where gendered subjectivities and embodied emotions constitute how nature-society relations are lived and experienced on a daily basis. By engaging the insights from feminist political ecology literatures and emotional geographies literatures, the article demonstrates that resource struggles and conflicts are not just material challenges but emotional ones, which are mediated through bodies, spaces and emotions. Such a focus fleshes out the complexities, entanglements and messy relations that constitute political ecologies of resources management, where practices and processes are negotiated through constructions of gender, embodiments, and emotions. Abstractions of 'resource struggles' and 'resource conflicts' are thereby grounded in embodied emotional geographies of places, peoples, and resources, enabling us to better understand the ways resources and emotions come to matter in everyday survival struggles. This framing can enrich feminist political ecology theorizations and texture our understandings of commonly-used terms such as access, use, control, conflict and struggles vis-à-vis natural resources in any context. In other words, we are better able to conceptualize and explain how and why people access, use, and struggle over resources the ways they do. A case study of drinking water contamination from Bangladesh is used to develop the theoretical arguments in contributing to existing debates in (feminist) political ecologies.
KW - Bangladesh
KW - Conflict
KW - Emotional geography
KW - Gender
KW - Political ecology
KW - Resource access
KW - Water
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U2 - 10.1016/j.geoforum.2010.12.002
DO - 10.1016/j.geoforum.2010.12.002
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:79952490746
SN - 0016-7185
VL - 42
SP - 163
EP - 172
JO - Geoforum
JF - Geoforum
IS - 2
ER -