Jessica Barnes

Water worlds: Introduction to the special issue of Social Studies of Science

The use and management of the world’s freshwater has become a critical focus of scholarly engagement. In the introduction to this special issue on water worlds, we highlight two contributions that science and technology studies offers to recent conceptualizations of water relations. The first emphasizes the multiple ontologies of water, resulting from its varied enactments in different sociotechnical assemblages. The second underscores water as a substance that does not merely mediate relations between existing social groups, but constitutes a necessary material for the organization of life in late modernity.

Pumping possibility: Agricultural expansion through desert reclamation in Egypt

This paper examines the role played by pumps as a technology of water access. In the desert that borders Egypt’s cultivated zone, pumps provide the water vital for reclamation, transforming desert into fields. Using two case studies of agricultural expansion into the desert margins, the paper explores the different ways in which farmers employ pumps to tap into the waters of the Nile. The pump is, as other scholars of science and technology studies have demonstrated, a prototypical nonhuman actor. Yet I argue that we cannot see the pump in isolation, but have to look at the passage of water through the pump and the interaction between multiple pumps in the landscape. Pumps rework the flow of water, redistributing the possibilities of agricultural production. At the same time, the flow of water in one direction shapes the possibilities for pumping in another. As some farmers pump water to irrigate the desert, they divert water away from others. As new fields emerge, old fields are rendered unproductive, generating new points of tension, resistance, and inequality within and between communities. The paper demonstrates, therefore, how situating an artifact in its material context brings to light new relations between that technology and the society that it both shapes and is shaped by.

Water, water everywhere but not a drop to drink: The false promise of virtual water

The concept of “virtual water,” which represents the volume of water needed to produce a particular quantity of agricultural commodity, has become popular among international water experts. Advocates of the concept argue that trade in virtual water can help even out the imbalances generated by the irregular distribution of water resources around the world – an attempt to make the world conform to an abstract model that some scholars have termed “virtualism”. This paper argues that the concept of virtual water is limited, however, by its reduction of water to a question of crop inputs alone, erasing both the labor of those who channel that water onto their fields and of the water itself as it moves through the landscape. The paper focuses on the case of Egypt, an arid country where water scarcity poses a critical challenge and where water experts are increasingly talking about virtual water as a policy solution. The government’s policy to decrease the area of water-intensive rice cultivation, limit rice exports, and increase rice imports exemplifies a virtual water logic. Yet, I argue, seeing water as being virtually embedded in rice obscures the way in which it washes salts from the soil of rice paddies and maintains soil quality. The fact that water fulfills multiple functions, beyond just that of feeding crops, helps explain why the government’s efforts to implement a policy that makes sense from a virtual water perspective have so far been unsuccessful. The paper concludes that attention to the labor of people and the resources that they mobilize reveals some of the socio-natural elements that may evade, challenge, and defy virtualisms.

States of Maintenance: Power, Politics, and Egypt's Irrigation Infrastructure

Egypt’s irrigation infrastructure comprises a vast network of dams, canals, offtakes, and ditches, which direct water from the Nile throughout the Nile Valley and Delta to millions of farmers who rely on that water to cultivate their land. In this paper, I focus on the vital work of maintenance, which keeps this infrastructure functioning and the water flowing. Yet rather than taking maintenance as an inherent good, I look critically at what exactly is being maintained. I contrast two forms of canal maintenance: first, the work that Egypt’s Ministry of Water Resources and Irrigation conducts, mostly during an annual maintenance period; second, the maintenance that farmers conduct on an everyday basis. State-led maintenance, I argue, is as much about reasserting state authority over the irrigation system as it is about fixing problems within the system. The unsung maintenance of irrigation ditches by farmers, on the other hand, is not only about cleaning ditches but also building communal relations among farmers that are key to the delivery of the water on which they depend. Focusing attention on the decision-making processes around maintenance reveals the variegated outcomes of this work and how it maintains not only the material but also social order.