INVESTIGATING A ROLE FOR THE ARTS IN SUPPORTING RELATIONS OF CARE IN RAJASTHAN'S TRADITIONAL WATER INFRASTRUCTURES

This research network will explore how community-based arts can contribute to understandings and improvements in the welfare of those living in conditions of water scarcity. We expect the network to result in far-reaching multi-disciplinary collaboration on the themes of water, infrastructure, gender and social relations, care, sustainability, and inclusive communities between the UK and India. For this foundation-setting network project, our work will centre on the care practices associated with the development and maintenance of traditional water infrastructures in Rajasthan, India. Rajasthan is the driest state in India and has a long history of using simple rainwater harvesting and conservation practices to manage water scarcity. However, in recent decades these techniques have fallen out of use in favour of modern, centralised water extraction and distribution processes which have, unfortunately, largely failed to meet the needs of people in rural Rajasthan. As a consequence, many water experts in India are now advocating a return to smaller, decentralised and traditional rainwater harvesting to address water scarcity. Our project will take a careful look at the renewal of interest in traditional rainwater harvesting practices and the role these infrastructures play in both local social relations and the delivery of sustainable water security. Our project will draw together water and development specialists, government stakeholders, water providers and managers, socially engaged and community-based artists and gender experts in the exploration of traditional water conservation practices and infrastructures in Rajasthan. Socially engaged arts practice is at the heart of our approach. Knowledge and experience of harvesting in Rajasthan is embedded in local village cultures. By working with Indian artists who have specialised in processes of creative facilitation and inquiry we expect not only to collaboratively explore traditional practices, but also to disseminate this knowledge and experience in an accessible form to national and international policy circles and stakeholders. Our approach to 'care' draws on the experiences associated with the AHRC-funded project 'Towards-Hydrocitizenship' (2014-2017) through which PI Dr Buser studied the practices of urban water infrastructural maintenance and mending. Following Joan Tronto, we understand care to be 'everything that we do to maintain, continue and repair our world so that we can live in it as well as possible. That world includes our bodies, ourselves and our environment, all of which we seek to interweave in a complex, life-sustaining web' (1993, 103). Within the context of Rajasthan's traditional water infrastructures, this means looking to the way care is both a disposition and (often unacknowledged or unrecognised) practice that permeates social relations. It also explicitly acknowledges the non-human as a key agent in care assemblages. Our programme involves three workshops through which we will facilitate cross-disciplinary and international collaboration. The first two of these will take place in Rajasthan where we will discuss and explore the conditions of water scarcity and water infrastructure in Rajasthan. This will include working with Indian-based arts practitioners and traditional water infrastructure users and caretakers. The third workshop will take place in Bristol, UK and centre on widening creative, academic and policy engagement with the concepts of infrastructural care and furthering our research agenda. This will include a mini-conference and an exhibition of materials and creative outputs from the first two workshops and Indian arts commissions.