Knowledge Others, Others' Knowledge: The Need for a New Epistemology of Water

Abstract

This paper examines the ways in which knowledge about water has conventionally been generated by modern water scientists and illuminates how this approach leaves out the diverse “ways of knowing” water and how scientism creates a trap of concrete evidential certainty. Through the example of a failed conversation, it questions the basic epistemological underpinnings of understanding water in modern scientific inquiries—the means of knowing rivers, and how they conflict with feminist epistemologies and fail to account for the “knowledge others” and “others’ knowledge”. The paper concludes with observations on why we need new epistemologies of water in the Anthropocene.