Fluid Landscapes: Materializing the Future on Thailand's Flooded Rivers

Abstract

In 2011 rivers in Thailand demonstrated their irrepressibility in unprecedented flooding. The Thai state responded to the dramatic floods with a comprehensive water management plan including 21 new dams on upland tributaries, which in turn mobilized anti-dam protest campaigns across Northern Thailand. The material upheaval became the catalyst for my research as it disrupted normative hydrosocial relations and drew water into political debate and social contestation over the future of Thailand’s waterscapes. Based on 15 months of ethnographic research with three rivers and three river communities in the critical post-flood period, this dissertation examines how rivers in Thailand become politically active in the tense, fragmentary work of world-making, in claims of indigeneity, in protests against development agendas, and in the negotiation of disasters. To do this, I approach rivers as water-beings with creative and diffuse capacities to co-constitute the world and create political and cosmopolitical effects. I trace the entanglements between people and water, human beings and water-beings, across varied geographies, histories, and socioecologies to demonstrate how these multimaterial, multispecies assemblages produce overlapping and contradictory realities. I argue that the social, material, and discursive transformations in the aftermath of disasters compel us to reevaluate how we understand nature and renegotiate how we make political and ecological claims with it.