Aquifers, Science, and Spatial Imaginaries

Despite remaining largely out of public view during the twentieth century, aquifers are emerging from their relative obscurity as governments invest considerable resources in scientific research and experiment with new governance models to face the looming global water crisis. This interdisciplinary research project investigates how, as aquifers gain more public attention, social life above the surface of the Earth intersects with the material world below it.

The projects’ central research question examines how spatial imaginaries of the underground change when aquifers acquire a prominent place in the public sphere. With water becoming one of the most endangered resources globally, policy makers and experts increasingly understand the urgency of engaging local actors in aquifer protection. However, their ideas of who those actors are and how they conceptualize aquifers often assume single-issue representations of human experience.

This project counterbalances those representations by investigating aquifers as spatial formations laden with cultural meaning.

This research consists of a longitudinal, ethnographic, and multi-modal study of how increased circulation of scientific knowledge about aquifers recasts the relations between surface and subsurface, and reshapes the legal and cultural relations between property and environmental responsibility. The project investigates two recently created participatory aquifer management plans and focuses on the work that local residents, property owners, and public servants do to implement them.

Specifically, the project (1) identifies the scientific ideas that circulate through participatory aquifer management plans, (2) documents how everyday citizens understand spatial features (surface and subsurface), (3) maps the projects through which participants enact their responsibility to protect aquifers, and (4) identifies the points of friction and the complementarities between demands to protect aquifers and the surface-based notions of property that participants hold. The project develops theoretical resources to conceptualize aquifers as more than water quantities waiting to be extracted.

Methodologically, the project combines ethnographic research, data visualization techniques, and collaborative maping. Additionally, the project supports junior scholars with scientific training and professional mentoring.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.