The Water and Care Network

The network's scholarly focus is to understand water as both ecological and social infrastructure—an element of life, care, and justice that connects bodies, environments, and histories. Water can serve as relational and ethical medium through which ecological and social responsibilities are enacted. Drawing on feminist and Indigenous epistemologies, the network’s aim is to think through what it would mean to decentre a perspective of water as “resource” in favour of an understanding of water as relative. 

The network’s purpose is threefold. First, it advances scholarly engagement with water and care by integrating perspectives from gender studies, environmental humanities, and Indigenous studies. These frameworks position care as a central analytic for ecological thinking—one that links planetary survival to the ethics of interdependence. Second, it seeks to build a collaborative platform connecting scholars and institutions in Bergen and beyond to international research and activism. In doing so, the network aims to bring Nordic and global debates on ecological justice together. Third, it works to consolidate an enduring research field around water and care, fostering conceptual, methodological, and pedagogical approaches that reimagine relations between humans, environments, and more-than-human worlds.

By foregrounding feminist, decolonial, and Indigenous care-based approaches, the Water and Care Network responds to urgent planetary challenges—climate change, pollution, extractive industries, and the inequitable distribution of ecological harm. Starting with/from water, the network seeks to interrogate colonial histories, gendered labor, and environmental injustice, while also offering alternative imaginaries of resilience and responsibility.

The Water and Care Network has an online reading group. If you are working on water and care and are interested in joining the group, please e-mail Riikka Prattes.

The network will organize a series of events funded by the Nordic Gender Fund (external link). See below.