I attended the International Conference of the Royal Geographical Society (RGS) in London together with two HydroSocialExtremes fellows, Maria Rusca and Elisa Savelli. This event attracted over 1,800 scientists from around the world. I had a chance to interact with both physical and human geographers involved in water related science, and brainstorm about future research work and scientific proposals.
Maria co-organized (with Filippo Menga, Reading University) a fabulous panel entitled “Water matters: infringing the water-society divide through interdisciplinary engagement”, which attracted numerous contributions of high scientific quality. These were presented in three oral sessions corresponding to the three thematic areas of the panel: i) Materiality of water and everyday practices of access, distribution and disposal; ii) Hydrosocial responsibilities and socio-hydrology; iii) Commodification of water quality, health and diseases. Elisa presented her PhD work about inequalities and injustice in the Cape Town water crisis. I was fascinated by seeing a number of fruitful collaborations across multiple disciplines, which I believe will substantially advance our fundamental knowledge about the role of water resources in nature and society.
