Global Water Inequalities

Students from sociology, history, geography, global studies, economics, political science, international relations, and more will be interested in this course that will help them articulate important theories, understand substantive issues, and learn how they can research and take action on global water inequalities.

This course argues that a global (transnational) approach to water must begin by looking at social inequality, social structure. This allows access not only to the study of social and political power through water infrastructure, but to see concretely the consequences of unequal rights, racism, access, and representation to this most vital of all resources. Therefore, the purpose of the course is to bring together emerging perspectives on water inequalities within different national contexts, but also across them. Often, courses on water policy focus on discrete dimensions of particular societies, e.g., Southwestern U.S., Spain, Israel, Saudi Arabia, Mexico, South Africa, etc. in isolation. But few investigate and provide a common framework for students to understand the interrelations between water regimes.

In the past few years, water issues and inequalities have begun to be investigated with a new enthusiasm as sociologists, social geographers, anthropologists, and political scientists have developed a wide array of theoretical frameworks, analytical notions, and case studies. To date, water issues and the link to social inequality and racism are often taught as part of existing disciplinary coursework in Environmental Sociology, Environmental History, Human Geography of the Environment, and Environmental Anthropology, or they may be touched upon within courses that focus on environmental dimensions of political economy such as Political Ecology, a field that has aimed to gather up some of the predominant theories from these various fields. However, this course does something different. By addressing global inequality, the course works with students towards analyzing the systematic differences in the distribution of socially valued resources across the world. Water, this course insists, is a useful conduit to understanding these differences because of its uniquely multivalent and multiscalar nature.

As such, the global environmental debate about water is not just about the flow of an organic compound, but about how water involves flows of capital, of material infrastructural components, of policies, and of ideas across geographical scales and political systems. In this class, we will develop this type of analytical thinking through deliberative dialogue that steps outside of the comfortable frameworks of national containers, and into the global networks of water.