Lecture title: City Water Matters

Streaming link: https://aho.cloud.panopto.eu/Panopto

The lecture is organized by AHO’s Videreutdanningsmaster i urbanisme / The Executive Master in Urbanism and OCULS: The Oslo Center for Urban and Landscape Studies.

The lecture discusses the significance of water to everyday life in cities and look at a multiplicity of practices which often go unnoticed or barely remarked. Water in cities is as much about the passions of those that swim in its hidden places or sit by its fountains, as it is about the pipes that deliver it, or institutional interventions. Water is as much a cultural object as a material substance — a source of complex meanings and practices. Professor Sophie Watson explores different elements of water’s presence, as material object, cultural representation, as movement, as actor, as practice and as ritual.

Bio
Professor of Sociology, Sophie Watson, from the Open University in Great Britain. Professor Watson holds professorships at the University of East London, University of Bristol and University of Sydney.




She has previously been the Co-Director of the ESRC Centre for Research on Socio-Cultural Change consultancies and activities in policy development include, among others, Newcastle University, Thames Water and the Vienna Science and Technology Fund. Sophie Watson’s current research focuses on City water and its socio-cultural practices, socio-technical networks, and regulatory frameworks. Other research projects focus on the Everyday life and the Digital Society, Street markets as Transcultural/Transnational Spaces, the ‘multicultural’ in everyday spaces, and "Spatial Justice in the City".