 So this is the world into which Margaret Zvatovin, a water engineer, entered in 1990. And she started her career in the International Water Management Institute in 1990 as a water engineer. So what took place? It's a major transformation since then. And she was telling me that she is one who learns through experience. So not only is this personal experience important in her upbringing, I think also in what she turned out to be also the professional experience of working for many years for International Water Management Institute. Last night I was thinking, oh God, how am I going to introduce this person whose work was so inspirational in my own development as a researcher. You know, it's still to be, you know, still rather underdeveloped, still too long way to go. But still she was very influential. So I googled her. Margaret Zvatovin, 25,000, you know, in scholar Google comes up, 25,000 hits. So that's what Margaret Zvatovin for you. She is now in Wageningen University, another very masculine world of really hard-nosed water engineers. But then she continues to be a feminist. And not just about our jail hours, she says we are feminists, you know. I'm putting forth a feminist perspective in water. And the reason why she is the conference keynote is a little bit of feminist politics here, as you can understand. In many water conferences we got tired of seeing gender put in a corner. You know, just a session on gender, a book on water, one chapter on gender, that covers it all. And then we talk about women at the center putting, of water sector. You know, the policy makers talk about that. That never happens. So, you know, the streams of water knowledge that we have, that I have alluded to earlier, feminist scholarship is never placed at the center of that, or at the forefront of that stream of knowledge, various streams of knowledge. And I know Margaret Zvatovin will, you know, what she has to say today will again make you all think and place that scholarship in the forefront. So, welcome to you, Margaret. Thank you, Kuntala. And that was a very appropriate quote because it's actually with the thing with which I want to start my presentation. I've called my presentation No More Heroes Anymore. And that's because I think that indeed those pioneering engineers that used to exist in the 19th and 20th century, they're no longer here. And I will argue that maybe that is a good thing, that maybe these kind of heroes always need to be treated with suspicion. This is one of them. I think people from India will probably recognize this guy. He is Sir Arthur Scott. He was a very famous irrigation engineer, a British irrigation engineer. And he still aspires a lot of admiration in Andhra Pradesh because of his infrastructural designs. He actually was, he really helped taming some rivers, making water productive. And so he's still revered. There's still statues like these at the intakes of the works that he constructed. And so he is a great, inspiring person. So I think he is also one of the first who launched the idea of connecting all India's rivers. That is still an idea that is still very alive today. So this is one of the heroes. Another one is I'm from the Netherlands. In the Netherlands we also have these heroes. And there are many people who agree that actually these heroes, these water engineers have led the foundation for what the country is today. And if I think a couple of years ago we had a kind of online contest of who is the biggest hero in the Netherlands. And some of these engineers, they actually scored very high. This is a statue of Cornelis Leili, his name. This statue is placed at the beginning of the Afsluit Dijk, which is a famous dike which was constructed to close of a sea and thus creates a lake and the possibility to construct folders. So the statue is there and big and for everyone to see and to admire and to remember. So this is indeed, like Kuntlade, these are the big men that inspire admiration and awe actually. This is what the icon of engineering. And I think many, I'm an engineer and I think many engineers today still dream a little bit about being like this. About having the power and the control to actually redesign large stretches of land and of water to make this world into a better place. Because don't get me wrong, these were in fact very nice people. They really wanted to do good and they combined a sort of practical ingenuity with a, you could say a Samaritanian need to really help and to do good. And of course that was also linked to moral superiority and patriarchal values or whatever. But they really, they were nice people often. What I want to do today with my presentation is to suggest that today we don't have these heroes anymore. Those big nice inspiring men that all of us look up to and that we can use as role models. And I think that is because the terms of water heroism have changed are very different today than what they used to be. Also because water problems have really changed. They're very different from what they used to be. So solving those problems also requires very different kinds of knowledge and very different kinds of expertise and very different kinds of knowledge of heroes. And what I'll suggest is that for developing these new kinds of knowledge, feminist scholarship is very useful. There's some very interesting insights from feminist scholarship that can help, really help developing these new kinds of knowledge that are necessary. What I'll do in the rest of my presentation is first I'll explain how water problems of today are very different from those of yesterday. And then I'll continue with suggesting what kind of, how feminist scholarship can contribute to developing the new kind of knowledge that is necessary. So today's water problems, so how are they different? Well in the golden ages of engineering, in a way you could say it was relatively easy because water was there to be made useful to humans. And the only thing that you needed to do was to invent infrastructure to actually make that happen. And water was, it seemed plenty and it was often harmful because there were floods, etc. But it was, so a lot of that was, a lot of water knowledge was about development and the construction of new projects. That's also why engineering figured so prominently in this knowledge. Today, water knowledge is really about how to save and conserve water and how to allocate it among competing users and users. It's also about how to control floods to protect people and other beings from floods and pollution. Water used to be considered as something that could be used to capture human users. And today it's really a worry about how to best allocate it, how to prioritise its allocation and distribution among users and users. And this of course, this change is associated with what many call the closure of river basins. What is also different from the golden ages of engineering is the almost, well the general belief that you could say in progress and development. And the idea that science and engineering, the most recent insights in science and engineering would help leading to ever increasing prosperity and wealth. Today it's not so self-evident anymore what progress, modernity, development is all about. And it's also not so self-evident anymore what kind of science or how science contributes to this development. Doubts are based on the realisation that the western world is and cannot be taken as the standard and model for the rest of the world. And on the awareness that western development was and is achieved at the cost of model and underdevelopment elsewhere. Wealth and poverty are connected by unequal terms of trade that are maintained through economic, political and military powers. For water these doubts are importantly fuelled by accounts of the high social and environmental costs of large water development projects. The Sardar Sarovar Dam in India is an infamous example. The Three Gorges Dam in China is another one. And of course what has also happened is the environmental concerns have really achieved a much higher prominence on water agendas. And these concerns are only heightened by climate change. These worries about the connections between development and water and the connections between are not local. They're increasingly global. This is just one example of a global connection that comes from a research project I'm involved in. It's about water that is actually taken from the high andes. We just heard a presentation about water cultures close to Lima in the high andes. And this is a project where this water is through large infrastructural project is taken from the Colca Valley to the Peruvian desert. In the first incident it was meant for mestizo farmers to produce all kinds of agricultural crops. And now actually it's increasingly used by large agricultural, international agricultural companies who come in, appropriate the water and the land and use it to produce asparagus which are exported to the UK or to the Netherlands. Nobody in Peru eats asparagus. People don't even know what it is. So it's interesting that there's water that is taken from the high mountains and actually you could say. So that really raises some very disturbing questions about how water should be managed and controlled. This is another example. It's an example of Levi's producing what they call water less genes. And I find it a very troubling example because what it also shows is that actually I as a Western consumer might have more possibilities to control how water is managed in a specific place than the people actually affected by the use of that water. So that brings me also to the third way in which water problems of today have changed. Which is that water development and management used to be considered the realm of the state. It was public. States were responsible for doing it. And today, partly because of privatization and other new liberal reforms and partly in response to the uncertainty and complexity that characterizes water problems, many new actors have entered the water management scene, private companies, civil society organizations. And like this example also shows, the skills and territories of governance have also really changed with water control really being dispersed and globalizing. But many would say water is no longer just managed, but it's governed. And some associated this change in terminology with a shift to polycentricity and others call it a shift, label it as a deliberative turn in water management. Oh yeah, this is just another example which I wanted to share with you about how troubling or how much more difficult it is to link water development to development of more large. This is an example of a research I'm doing involved in Morocco. Morocco has a booming agriculture. And many young people who used to migrate to France and to the Netherlands are now actually coming back or staying in Morocco to invest in agriculture. And so what you see, this is a picture you see an old man who is always an old fella, an old farmer. And he is dressed, you cannot see it on the picture, but he is dressed in one of those traditional dresses, Moroccan dresses. And next to him is his cousin, he's a young guy with a neatly shaven. And what you can see what it shows is that for this young guy there is really, there is a future and an identity in farming. Farming is no longer the dirty backward thing to do, now you can actually be modern also as a farmer. And these young men and others like him who tell me stories, their dreams about how they think of themselves as modern farmers. And modern farmers means that they see themselves, picture themselves strolling in the souk with their operating, their irrigation systems with their mobile phones. So they don't even have to get their clothes wet, etc. They can be nicely dressed. So that is an interesting development, opening up new ways of being for young men, but also raises troubling questions about uses of water, about pollution and about how these new identities are gendered. What does it mean for the women who experience this modernization? This is just a picture to illustrate a little bit how water is becoming more and more diversified with many more actors entering the scene. And it is a picture of a protest in Peru, in Yanacoche, where a large mining, gold mining company is not just only polluting the water but also diverting water streams. So these people are protesting. So all this to show and to illustrate how water problems of today are very different from those of yesterday. And what I think, at least what is my conclusion, if I look at all these differences, is that water has really become much more water management and has become much more openly political. It has become much more clear that water is really about distribution. It's about allocation. It's not just about distribution of water, but it's also about distributing technologies, about distributing public funds and money. It's about distributing decision-making power and authorities, etc. So it's deeply, deeply political. It's also political because it immediately ties in with visions of development and of ideologies of ideas about the future. Where should we go and when do we want to be? And of course it's political because it's about how to organize decision-making and how to create accountability and transparency. Which is very difficult with, for instance, water-less genes. Can you do it through corporate social responsibility mechanisms, for instance? How do you regulate water use and distribution? So water is really different. It's much more political. And it's actually because of this, at least that's my reading of it, that water problems have become so openly political that I think that feminist scholarship can really contribute to developing new kinds of knowledge. Because of course feminist scholars have been at the forefront of showing how knowledge itself is always political and of disentangling how things that we see as normal, as natural, are actually constructed and political. Oh yeah. And the only one thinking about new ways of developing the new water knowledge that is needed, there are many others and it engages with two larger debates that are going on. And one is the debate about, well those of you working on climate change are very familiar with this, is the debate about adaptive management or integrative management, about wicked problems, etc. The realization that many of the problems, including water problems that we're dealing with, are not characterized by what is here in this lower, the known heads. That is what science is based on, is based on ideas of causal relations, that causal and effect relations are repeatable, procedural, predictable, etc. But in fact most water problems happen, are complex. Which does also require different kinds of knowledge. The other development that is going on in thinking about new knowledges is the realization, how can I say it, the fact that much now about knowledge is about process, it's about how to rationally organize descent, the realization that there are many knowers and many knowledges. So I engage with these two kinds of debates that are already going on. There's two insights from feminist scholarship that I want to discuss with you. One is social natures, and actually I'm thrilled to be in an audience that is buzzing with this co-production, social natures, co-evolution, Latour, etc. because normally I often speak to audiences of water professionals for whom this is mind-dazzling. So for you this will not be new at all. And the second one is situated knowledge. Let me start with social natures, well if there's one insight, basic insight that informs feminist scholarship, it is that the distinction between men and women is not just natural, but importantly also social. I mean Simone de Beauvoir's phrase, it's of course the most famous expression of this. And that women are made not born, and that just as men are made not born, not just reflects empirical diversity and this is just one example. This is a picture of Sri Lanka women transplanting paddy seedlings. And I worked in Sri Lanka and when I would ask people why, is it women doing this work? And they would tell me, well you know, this requires bending over, that is only women can do that, that is very difficult. And it also requires this very tender dealing with these seedlings, you need small hands and you need to be very precise. So it's just women can do it. And then also you have to stand with your feet in the water all the time and that's men cannot do that. But then this is not even very far away from Sri Lanka, this is Bangladesh. And here it's men actually doing this very same task, transplanting paddy seedlings. And when I asked in Bangladesh why is it men doing this? They would say, well you have to bend over. That is very difficult. And it's very hard work men need to do it. And also you have to stand with your feet in the water because it would be very bad for women because it could affect their health and it's very difficult. And then you have to do it in a very precise way. They have to be made through rows. Women would not be able to do that. This is just one illustration. There are of course many illustrations of how the gender difference, the differences between men and women that we tend to think of as natural, are not natural at all. They're constructed there specific to time and to place. So to theorize this, of course the term gender was used, introduced to differentiate between those differences between men and women that are natural. That was called sex. And then those that are not natural, that was called gender. And that was an interesting concept because it allowed, for feminists, it allowed to engage in politics because if it's not natural, if it's a social construct, then you can question it and then you can also change it. And that was convenient because that's precisely what feminists wanted to do. So in other words, the concept of gender allowed to shift questions of inequality and difference from the domain of the indisputable to the domain of what could be debated and disputed. And what it therefore does and what I like most about it, that it allows questioning what it means to be a man or what it means to be a woman. Yet the concept of gender also turned out to be problematic because it remained, this distinction between sex and gender remained based on the idea that there is a distinction between nature and culture. And this is unsatisfactory because Sandra Harding said people are not Cartesian minds that happen to be located in biological matter in motion. So the critique of the concept was that actually if you really start thinking about it, it becomes very difficult to distinguish what is nature and what is culture. And when you really start thinking about it, you realise that you realise this co-evolution, that nature and culture are continuously co-evolving. But I find it very interesting in gender research, for instance, is the fact that a lot of research about differences between men and women is based on research that is done in one point in time. But actually, if you look at people's evolution, if you look at how they evolve from birth to when they are 20 or 30, you see that there is constant, indeed there is co-evolution, something that is called plasticity, and that is also visible in brains. So then it becomes indeed very hard to say, this is nature, this is culture because things continuously, the brains change according to the environment. So there is physical, bodily adaptations to the cultural and social environment. So what all this shows is that this distinction between nature and culture is not a given. It doesn't reflect any really existing reality out there, but it is itself a cultural construction. And of course that also then forms part of what needs to be challenged and questioned as part of a feminist project. Donna Haraway was one of the first to very eloquently formulate these ideas, and what she says is rather than marking categorically the determined pole, nature or women's body, all to easily mean the saving core of reality distinguishable from the impositions of patriarchy, imperialism, capitalism, racism, history, language. That repression of the construction of the category nature can be and has, that repression can be and has been both used by and against feminist efforts to theorise women's agency and status as social subjects. And that is not, of course this is an insight that is applicable much more widely than just to gender. It happens all the time. I was discussing with Jessica yesterday. She was in discussions about Indigenous people, the very same thing happens. You're either authentically Indigenous or you're naturally Indigenous. It has all to do with denominating things as natural, authentic and seeing them as original rather than seeing them as effects. So it's the confusing, confounding effects with cause. There are many words to express this and these words, everybody here is using them. Donna Haraway introduced the word cyborg nature culture to articulate this, that nature and culture are not discovered and that they co-evolve and co-produce. And there's also these questions, the very ideas of society and nature by showing that there's no essential difference between them prior to their interaction with each other. And one cannot be understood or even exist without the other. So the conceptual divide, what this means also is that this divide does not originate from any pre-existing reality but is the product of very particular ways of seeing and conceptualizing that belong to modernity. And what Donna Haraway also shows is that denominating something as either cultural or natural is in itself a political act. Because again, if you say something is natural then it's closed, you cannot discuss it anymore because it's natural. If it's cultural, if it's social, if it's historical then it becomes political and it can be debated. So it's very, and of course that is something that engineers always do and are very familiar with. They're very, and it's very, it happens a lot in water. For instance, water scarcity is often depicted as a natural phenomenon which makes it apolitical, it's affecting all of us, etc. So the same happens to climate change. And there are very interesting analysis done to show how this works and how people actually strategically use this and denominate things as natural to avoid any responsibility or not to be blamed for their actions, etc. Karen Bucker's famous study about the Yorkshire drought is of course one example. Another example is by a colleague of mine who did research in Mexico and she showed how drought in Mexico was born. Not because suddenly the climate had become much drier or there was less rain, but because subsidies to farmers were stopped. And farmers now suddenly were left to fend for themselves and this was expressed as a problem of drought. This is not to deny that there is an absolute or absolute or there is really drought or there is really floods, etc. It's just to say that the way we understand it is always through our minds and through our language. Of course, and as you all know, this idea of seeing nature and culture, nature and society as co-constituted is now very familiar and it can draw upon a growing body of environmental scholarship. That many of which takes inspiration from Haraway's work. There are many words also that are used, the co-production thesis, hybrids, assemblages, social natures, quasi-objects, for terms proposed are waterscapes or hydro-social networks. So I think I don't need to repeat this to this audience. I hope you understand this. What maybe is good to emphasize here also, at least something that I think is an implication of this way of thinking, is that it means that nature is always also social and that has implications for knowing and for knowing water. Because it means that water talks back to you always. Suddenly water has a voice because water exists only through what we think about water and how people give meanings to it. So that means in order to say differently that the subject split in that it's part of positive knowledge suddenly disappears. And it means that really the meanings people, including scientists, give to water start forming part of knowledge and are not separate from it. And there are some examples that I have. I think those of you who know the work of Jamie Linton, who has shown how the concept of the hydrological cycle is not just a representation of nature, but a very particular one that originated at a very particular moment and for very specific aims. And of course similar critical analysis have been done about propositions to use the river basin or the watershed as a natural domain for managing water with people showing, well, the boundaries of watersheds and river basins are not natural at all. And the definition of what it is is therefore always political. So this is the first insight that I would like to use and I think it's a feminist insight that is very useful for water scholarship, for knowing water. This is just one example of the co-production, co-constitution. This is a picture of a paramot. A paramot is an Andean highland and a paramot is seen as a sponge. So a lot of the water that people use downstream in these very high wetlands comes from the paramot. And increasingly in today's discourses, the conservation of the paramot therefore becomes very important. And in these discourses, the paramot is presented as a natural landscape. It's nature. And people have to either get out of there or be taught to conserve it. But actually, if you look at the history of paramots, they're... Sorry, I thought I had another picture. If you look at the history of paramots, they're actually produced landscapes. They're very much produced because the Alpaca herders who live here very actively modify, invest, do all kinds of things to produce water, you could say. So again, you see this also in a very material sense how this co-production is an interesting way of looking at things. The second insight, feminist insight, I want to propose as contributing to new types of water knowledge is situated knowledge. Let me... How will I do it? No. Let me first say, well, of course, where I come from, I'm an engineer. I work a lot among water experts and engineers. And of course, I've experienced it's often difficult to talk to them because their prevailing epistemological norm is positivist. So it's based on the belief that reality does exist independent of whatever we say about it. And it's also based on the idea that reality should be discovered and this process of discovery should happen by interchangeable knowers whose specificities of embodiment and subjective location disappear in the process. Adherence to this epistemological norm, which is, of course, linked to the possibility of transcendence, makes much water knowledge speak as if from nowhere, from a god-like position. From the perspective of someone without interest and background, someone who voluntarily represents the universal good or the universal truth, who is speaking on behalf of everybody or nobody. And of course, the co-production thesis, the idea that society and nature mutually co-evolve, deeply challenges this epistemological norm because it says, well, knowledge of power, knowledge and meanings and situations are deeply intertwined. And science is not distinguishable or even in a position to power and politics, but the two go very much together. Let me just give this example to show what this means. This is an example, again, from the Yanakochi a large gold mine company in Peru, in Cajamarca. This is one, how do you call it? Well, you can see what it says. What it says is, Yanakocha te contamina y asesina. So, Yanakocha is polluting you and it kills you. It's tome conciencia become aware. That's what it means. This is a slogan which is used by the environmental movement in Peru, which is a very strong movement and which has many scientists that work for them to actually establish that this gold mine is polluting the water and is killing people. So it's based on science. This is a billboard put up by the mining company Yanakocha. It says, que contamina realmente el agua? What does really pollute the water? And then it says, what really pollutes the water is people throwing their dirt in the river. Ría moderna no contamina. Modern mining doesn't pollute. And then it says it's all our responsibility to look after the water. So you see again also the political move of universalization. But this also, of course, you could say it's based on science. These mining companies, they have, well, the amount of money they have is just incredible. So they are very careful also about keeping, about their reputation and they will do anything to be seen as and present themselves as trustworthy and just therefore base themselves on scientific facts. And then a third one, this is in English so everybody can read it. It's about the mining Yanakocha which has received a prize from the government of Peru for its smart water solutions and for its, what could you say, its water stewardship, you could say. So the government of Peru was very awarded a prize and said, well, because Yanakocha is doing so well in protecting water sources and creating new infrastructure, et cetera. So it's another version of the same reality this time of the government also based on scientific facts. And what I just want to show with these three examples is that science can make you believe anything in a way. That's a simple way of saying it. And what this shows in terms of situated knowledge is that science doesn't exist without the people who produce that science. You can only understand these claims to the truth by knowing who produced them. And you need to really know where do they come from, how were they produced, how were they manufactured, these facts on which these three accounts of reality are based in order to be able to appreciate it. And that is precisely what, for instance, Donna Haraway and many others suggested they say and Haraway said, well, science emerges from very specific places from very specific people. It's not universal or placeless, but it comes from people with identities, with people with particular values and interests. So to make this knowledge travel, to make knowledge travel means to make others believe it, actually a lot of hard work is involved. It requires a lot of hard work. And a lot of that work is cultural and performative. It has to do with packaging knowledge into words and languages and shapes and forms that are recognized, accepted and attractive. One such form is, for instance, if it's published in a good scientific journal, then it must be true. Another form is a conference like this. That's a clear form, a clear cultural performative form of conveying knowledge. So this is part of this idea of knowledge as situated. So in this way also, knowledge does not just present realities out there in the field. Knowledge also represents ourselves, or we use knowledge to represent ourselves. And for engineers, these ideas, their positivist ideas about knowing, it's also part of a range of cultural resources they use to represent themselves. Not just to represent themselves, but also to distinguish themselves from, and their knowledge from that of others, from that of lay people, indigenous people, social scientists, for instance. And to claim we do the real knowledge. I have a... This is actually a quiz. I wanted to ask you, whom do you think of these people as a water engineer? Any idea? Nobody has an idea? No idea whatsoever. The upper left, this one? The woman? Any other ideas? All of them? I think the woman wearing a suit... Oh yeah, the woman wearing a suit, yeah. They're asking us to make a judgement out of context so that we need a situated understanding. I just wanted to show this... I just took these pictures from the internet. I don't know who these people are, what they do. I just wanted to show this because I think many of us do have ideas about what a water expert, what a social scientist, what a farmer should look like and behave. And of course, if you behave differently, if you look differently, if you talk differently, then you discredit it. And that's the only thing I wanted to bring home to you is that, of course, looking at these, immediately all kinds of these, in trying to think who is the real, or who is the engineer, immediately we start sifting through our own images of what is a water expert, what is an etc. And then we know we don't need to want to be biased so we'll say they're all etc. But those are very cultural things that happen and cultural things that are very important in the production of knowledge. And what I find also very important is that in these cultural performative aspects of knowledge production, gender and ethnicity are very, very important. And water engineers, I think, at least water bureaucracies, we did a recent study in South Asia and we found that in water bureaucracies, around 90% of the people working there are men. And I think that is probably true in much of the world. So water expertise in that sense is really tied up, definitions of what is good knowledge are tied up with definitions of what it means to be a man and a real man. It also means that if you're a woman and you want to become a water engineer, you have to do hard work, you have to do gender work, you have to show that you're and a very good engineer but at the same time still a real woman. Because if you're not both of them, because the two don't seem to go together, that's what I want to show. And it's also, I think, accepting that much knowledge is cultural, performative, also helps to, in a way you could say, reverse the research gaze. And to look at, for instance, water engineers as an ethnic tribe, can I say it that way? And do really nice, I think you could do really nice anthropological research about how engineers perform culturally their rituals, their whatever, to make their knowledge credible and to legitimate, et cetera. And that is, there's a very interesting research has been done. Ruth Aldensiel had, for instance, studied technology in the 20th century in the US. And what she found is that a group, her book is called Making Technology Masculine. And what she shows is that through conscious efforts to positively distinguish themselves and gain status and respect as a professional group, mechanical and civil engineers during the late 19th century in the US succeeded in delimiting the definition of technology as consisting of those activities they were doing. And all the other activities, for instance, because technology used to be crafts, basically. But by slowly changing this definition, they succeeded in discrediting all other kinds of crafts, like the things women were involved in or black people were involved in. So I think that is a very good realization. So what it means for producing new water knowledges and new and better knowledge. I think it's like what you do when you, it's maybe the metaphor is maybe you have to wear your clothes inside out, showing the seams and showing how they are produced and manufactured rather than trying to hide it. What is the usual norm in science? And instead show, this is the way it was produced. This is where it comes from, which is really different. And it is situated, this is me. It's not universal. I'm not transcendent, but I'm in this very place. And of course, yeah. So that is, I think, very useful also for new water knowledge. So what does all this mean for knowing water? I think what it means is the first thing, I already said it's the learning about the importance of situativeness and partiality. Of course, with situativeness comes partiality. All knowledge is partial. And becoming more explicit about how facts and truths are produced and by whom and for what purpose. It includes therefore serious efforts to be much more explicit about concepts, delimitations, theoretical assumptions and awareness of how these in fact order. Order water realities and in fact enact water realities and produce hierarchies. I think this recognition of situated knowledge counters dreams of generality and generalization. And it relaxes the search for one most accurate and reliable account of water problems as very problematic. So what it also does with that is opening the door for many other kinds of knowledges and knowers. Diversifying the public with whom experts should collaborate, redistributing environmental water expertise. And I think it should include very explicit efforts to invite those who experience changes in water flows as collaborators in any research projects and ask them to interrogate environmental expertise. And thirdly, what these insights do for new water knowledge is they also of course pose some very troubling questions because if there are so many knowledges and so many knowers, how to bring those together? How to bring those together so that water problems can actually be solved? And I think what this means is that the process dimensions of producing knowledge become much more important to rational organization of descent you could say. And of course you see that already happening also in water. In climate change you have the IPCC which is just experts but still you see there's many different knowledges and attempts to bring those together. What I feel, but my own feeling is that many of those attempts still rely on a very optimistic belief in the possibility of consensus. So what I think, what Family Scholarship also teaches us I think is that the production of knowledge will always remain controversial. So there will always be struggles, there will be disagreements and there will be people hating each other for what the other says. And I think that it's important to recognize that of course you also need to resolve it but it's also important to recognize it that water is politics and it will be an area of domain and an object of struggle. And we are running short of time so I will just take one or two questions. Unless they are really burning questions I would ask you to ask Marietta. I love to talk. Thank you so much Marietta. I just wanted to take up those two things on socio-natures and situating knowledges. I love the way your talk ends up opening up the scene of epistemological diversity and I just wanted to make a comment and ask your comments on I feel we've got more progress happening on the socio-nature side than on the situated knowledges side because in the Anthropocene it's getting more possible even for the most hardcore positive as science people to acknowledge that there is fuzzy boundaries between humans and nations. However, I have not seen very much undermining of the intensely religious faith in positivism, especially in Australia in positivist sciences on the situated knowledge front. People are happy to see knowledges situated when we're talking about human and social science knowledges but what we have not yet seen is very many engineers or scientists able to concede that their knowledge too is situated. They are still believing in a Newtonian, a Cartesian, a Baconian notion of universal and positive knowledges. A trend that I see has only been exacerbated by climate change. By climate change, well a discourse of neoliberal economics which is a sort of an external pressure that makes everything more and more positive. And I've been thinking about this too having spoken to water engineers and managers and so on and one of the things I reckon is that the engineering and science courses contained, at least in Australia, nothing about epistemology. People know nothing about history and philosophy of science or technology and so how can they even start to think about knowledge being situated when for them there is only one sort of knowledge the positive knowledge. So I'm just wondering, have you got any thoughts about how we start making better progress on getting the positivists to at least recognise that they're in a paradigm not just the method or the knowledge but how do we get them to recognise that they're in a paradigm and from there have a more epistemological diverse point of view. I wonder if you've had some thought. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. What works? Well it's interesting. I am teaching epistemology to engineering students. Oh come to Australia. Not many of them like it actually because many of them say well but I just want to help solving things and build things and design things. I think what would be a useful route to maybe make and I think many engineers when you talk to them in private are very much aware of the what is it the big gap that exists between the positivist ideals and what they're actually doing. Well they all talk about what their wife or kids do. So I think what would be very interesting is have almost anthropological studies of what engineers are doing and then confront them with this. Because in their everyday working practice what they're doing is not positivist all the time they're negotiating they're bargaining, they're etc. So in that sense it's part of the ritual it's part of their culture to continuously reiterate that they are positivist, that theirs is the only truth etc. At the same time, no. I think they believe in it partly but their practices are very different so I think it would be very interesting to study those practices and yeah. It could be a starting point for another research. I would like to do that. It's very difficult to get it funded though. Please feel free to ask any more questions to Marie I hope that the lunchtime will be quite an active one. Is there another one in question? Margaret? They're all pretty sorry it is. This idea of wearing your clothes inside out and showing how the truth is made and how the knowledge is made etc. And you said that that was a pathway through to then having acceptance of multiple knowledge etc. I have a little fear that when the way that scientific knowledge is made clearer that that will only encourage interviews on the positive side to defend it more strongly. While it's just accepted without any challenge that this is the truth you don't have to go into a massive defence. Of course. That's very true. But that's not just true for engineers. That's true for anyone, also true for anyone who engages in politics. Of course it can be very strategic to either take a very positive stance or to take a very situated stance. Where it also starts muddling. So yes. We always also in a sort of strategic battlefield also when you produce knowledge and the strategic effects of what we say and how we do it also need to be taken into account. But those are always I think very local. Those are very difficult to give general answers to. And again I think being promulgous in an experience as long as we've been working very closely with the organization you know. And just to take the last question. Thank you very much. It was very helpful. I've been in agreement with you and you helped me kind of walk along this path and we come to a lot of competing rationalities or competing interpretations. I'd like you to speak towards implementation. Because I feel that positivism and scientific approaches they persist because an alternative is not very well verbalized. So stepping beyond recognizing competing rationalities for us and tell us how we draw around. It's not just difficult. It's also difficult because positivism is institutionalized. We all live in the whole academia and politics it's all organized in around ideas of positivism. What I draw inspiration from myself as possible way again it has very much to do with practices and it's related to just to give an example to the picture I showed of Morocco. And actually it's a project on drip irrigation. Drip irrigation is seen by many in the world as one important solution to the water crisis because drip irrigation allows you to grow more crop per crop. The project is really about seeing what is happening with drip irrigation in farmers fields and with farmers and what it actually does. And what we find is that drip irrigation the technology does many different things to different people. What we also see is that there is not just one drip irrigation there are many drip irrigation so I again I think documenting this without I mean you don't even have to criticize an epistemology but you can just show diversity and show and it's something the project is nice because drip irrigation is something positive. Everybody likes it so everybody wants to talk about it. It's a success. So it's not something how are you polluting like the Yanakochee project is in that sense very much more difficult. This one and what you see is people at all levels what I call and so what I call this is I call it reflexive engineering because what you see is actually engineers with farmers I've visited welders who are redesigning systems in their own little workshops and so all kinds of material things are happening and around all kind of social practices to create new reality that have nothing to do with these high flow ideas and that have nothing to do so again I think oh let's use those let's document them let's use those to engage really with what is going on with you but changing all the positive institutional because I don't know how to do that