73
Katherine Jones, University of the West of England; Tom Payne, University of Aberystwyth, and Owain Jones, Bath Spa University, UK
[brief explanation of Hydrocitizens and how it relates to the Hydrocitizenship project] Hydrocitizens currently has 36 members and is averaging over 500 page visits a day. We are keen to foster and engage in conversations and exchanges about water and related issues with others that are already engaged in the field. Our hope is that we will not only produce a substantial record of our activities and discussions over the course of the next three years, but that others that are not directly involved in Hydrocitizenship might promote their work and engage in debates, making the community their own and enriching our research and their own.
Hydrocitizens is a product of Hydrocitizenship but does not aim to provide a unified authorial voice for the project. Instead, it hopes to do the following:
- Provide a platform through which multiple voices might be heard.
- Create a space in which others might share their work in the hope that unexpected conversations and collaborations might occur. This community hopes to help draw attention to the work of others whilst also revealing the day to day processes behind a large interdisciplinary research project (Hydrocitizenship).
- Provide a way of linking up the four Hydrocitizenship case study areas (Yorkshire, mid Wales, Bristol and the Lee Valley, UK). The community has already led to collaborative ways of working, with ideas from various case study areas feeding into planning processes elsewhere. As time goes by this could prove to be an innovative framework for geographically dispersed interdisciplinary research.
- Create a legacy for the project that exists independently beyond Hydrocitizenship. It is hoped that members will configure the community through the nature of their participation and that it will take on a life of its own.
Here is a selection of some of the many blog entries on Hydrocitizens.
1. Messing About in Boats by Stephen Bottoms
Re-reading Grant Kester’s introduction to Conversation Pieces: Community and Communication in Modern Art (2004) recently, I was struck by his opening anecdote about a spring boat trip on Lake Zurich in 1994:
“Seated around a table in the main cabin were an unusual gathering of politicians, journalists, sex workers and activists from the city of Zurich. They had been brought together by the Austrian arts collective WochenKlausur as part of an ‘intervention’ in drug policy. Their task was simple: to have a conversation. . . . Over the course of six weeks, WochenKlausur organised dozens of floating dialogues . . . Many of the participants in these boat talks would normally have taken opposite sides in the highly charged debate over drug use and prostitution, attacking and counter-attacking with statistics and moral invective. But in the ritualistic context of an art event . . . they were able to communicate outside the rhetorical demand