#11 Water justice, activism, and the Rights of Nature movement w/Andrea Muehlebach

To kick off season three of Anthropology on Air, we speak with Andrea Muehlebach. Andrea is Professor of Maritime Anthropology and Cultures of Water at the University of Bremen in Germany, where she also leads the Bremen NatureCultureLab. She was visiting Bergen to deliver a talk entitled, “Do Waves Have Rights?”

The Rights of Nature movement insists that “nature has a dignity, outside and in excess of its use to humans,” Andrea explains. In this conversation, we discuss Andrea’s current research into this movement, its origins in Indigenous philosophy, and what shape it is taking in different European countries today.

We also discuss the difference between privatisation and financialisation of public utilities; collective actions against such moves in Italy and beyond; how to do ethnographic work with such a “slippery substance” as water; responses to water scarcity in Europe at a time of climate change; doing multi-sited ethnographies; and much more.

Andrea’s most recent book, A Vital Frontier: Water Insurgencies in Europe (Duke University Press, 2023) is a multi-sited ethnography with activists across Europe, specifically Italy, Ireland and Germany, as they struggle to preserve water as a commons and a public good in the face of privatisation efforts.

She is also the author of The Moral Neoliberal: Welfare and Citizenship in Italy (Chicago University Press, 2012), which explored neoliberal welfare “reforms” and the moral authoritarianisms (and struggles, tensions, contradictions) that often accompany them. In addition to her two books, Andrea is the author of a great many articles on a variety of other subjects including poverty and race in Italy, economic despair, and the concept of citizenship.

We hope you enjoy the conversation.

https://www.andreamuehlebach.com/

http://naturenkulturen.de/