Description
Book SynopsisFighting for the River portrays women's intimate, embodied relationships with river waters and explores how those relationships embolden local communities' resistance to private run-of-the-river hydroelectric power plants in Turkey. Building on extensive ethnographic research, Özge Yaka develops a body-centered, phenomenological approach to women's environmental activism and combines it with a relational ontological perspective. In this way, the book pushes beyond the natural resources frame to demonstrate how our corporeal connection to nonhuman entities is constitutive of our more-than-human lifeworld. Fighting for the River takes the human body as a starting point to explore the connection between lived experience and nonhuman environments, treating bodily senses and affects as the media of more-than-human connectivity and political agency. Analyzing local environmental struggles as struggles for coexistence, Yaka frames human-nonhuman relationality as a matter of socio-ecological justice.
Table of ContentsContents
List of Illustrations
Abbreviations
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Gender, Body, and Relationality in
the Struggle for the Environmental Commons
1. Saving “God’s Water”: Motivations and Dynamics of the Anti-HEPP Struggle
2. Resources, Livelihoods, Lifeworld: Linking Gender and Environment through the Lived Body
3. Sense, Affect, Emotion: Bodily Experiences of River Waters and Emergent Political Agency
4. Place, Body, Memory: River Waters and the Immanence of the Past in the Present
5. Ethics, Ontology, Relationality: Grassroots Environmentalism and the Notion of
Socio-Ecological Justice
Conclusion: Toward an Ecological Approach to Lifeworld, Sociality, and Agency
Appendix
Notes
References
Index
