Presentation at the RGS-IBG Annual International Conference 2024, London

From 27 to 30 August 2024, the RGS-IBG Annual International Conference 2024 was held in London under the theme ‘Mapping’. The conference explored ‘mapping in all its forms, in a world saturated with maps, from historical cartography to the newest technologies and practices of map-making’. Post-doctoral researcher Daniele Tubino presented a paper entitled ‘Engaging with onto-epistemological river struggles through counter-mapping’.The paper was led by Edward Huijbens and co-authored by Daniele, Sarita Bhagat, Bibiana Duarte Abadia, Juliana Forigua-Sandoval, Rutgerd Boelens, Jennifer C. Veilleux, and Leila Harris.

Daniele’s presentation looked at how academics and river grassroots movements used counter-mapping to work together on three case studies from Colombia, Ecuador and India and how mapping was used to support river struggles in these cases. Built on the concept of ‘riverhood’ this paper explores counter-mapping as an engaged activist research approach coming to terms with the state of being a river. Daniele discussed the counter-mapping in connection with rivers as hydrocommons and reflected through four interrelated ontologies —“river-as-ecosociety”, “river-as-territory”, “river-as-subject” and “river-as-movement” — that stand for different ways of understanding and engaging with rivers in different contexts, cultures and time scales. The presentation concluded by highlighting the transformative changes in the creation and maintenance of hydrocommons that can potentially be achieved through counter-mapping activities and their coalitions in the presented cases. Counter-mapping practices in these (and other cases related to Riverhood and River Commons) have the potential to foster multi-actor and multi-scalar dialogues that negotiate and articulate actionable proposals for river regeneration and socio-environmental justice. Such practices hold the possibility of redressing power structures, contributing to the reversal of widespread socio-environmental degradation of rivers, and countering developments of neoliberal enclosure.