Buckets at the end of the world: Rivers that run dry, rivers that overflow

There is a leaky bucket situated in a time and place of hydrosocial ruptures. This dissertation explores hydrosocial ruptures – moments of transitions from drought to flood and when such transitions challenge existing knowledge systems. In the lower Peruvian Amazon, communities in Bajo Belén, Punchana, Tamshiyacu, and El Chino live with river rhythmicity (locally known as vaciante and creciente), and in the years also transitions from drought to flood. Yet situated meanings of living and learning with river rhythmicity remain under-researched. The leaky bucket illustrates the cracks in both infrastructure and epistemology: heavy reliance on detached risk assessments, a homogenous gaze of the Amazonian lifescapes, and interventions that make certain ways of living invisible. Through the allegory of the leaky bucket and within the chapters are acts of patching together a range of theories and concepts on hydrosocial thinking, political ecology, capabilities approaches, social construction of risk, situated knowledges, and decolonial thought. Each contributes something vital to the questions I ask: how are droughts and floods lived with and known in specific areas within the Amazon region? How do communities know with the river and how do different ways of knowing with the river shape their day-to-day and seasonal activities? Each chapter contributes to unpacking the complexity of lived realities and experiences in the region. Chapter 3 provides a general overview of drought and flood adaptation, and highlights the importance of experiential and experimental learning through a systematic literature review. Inspired by how experiential learning shape decisions and adaptation, Chapters 4, 5, and 6 unpack experiences and living with droughts and floods grounded on field-based research – storytelling sessions, drawing sessions, and ethnographic poetry. Chapter 4 foregrounds the complexities of living with river rhythmicity along Itaya River, and how braiding Capabilities Approach and Environmental Justice can support policy and decision frameworks that care for plural ways of living and aspiring with the river. Chapter 5 proposes risk windows as a situated knowing with the river. The risk windows highlight that temporal and spatial dimensions risk vary among riverine communities, and that communities’ situatedness with the river shape their seasonal and day-to-day anticipations. Lastly, Chapter 6 presents how riverine communities relate to futures, and how they live with temporal tensions between the day-to-day and the yet-to-come. As part of my science communication work, Chapter 7 details the traveling art-science exhibit from to Lima and Iquitos (Peru), to Amsterdam (The Netherlands). By engaging in grounded partnerships, and creative methods, this research lends spaces for epistemologies and imaginaries otherwise. The leaky bucket allegory becomes a decolonial provocation on how drought and flood knowledge is constructed. What emerged was a complex web of realities that emphasize the importance of when and where. The timing of when an event happens is crucial to unpacking how the event might unfold, and how the riverine communities might be impacted. Taking these complexities together create a riverscape that demands a more careful research ethics and approach. This dissertation creates spaces for dialogues with hydrosocial and socio-hydrology – how their worldviews and epistemic stances vary and how these differences result to certain forms of answer and solutions. At the core of this research lies an urgent call for researchers to gaze at cracks from the leaky bucket – how might our ways of knowing help create or usher more careful ways of engaging with communities and rivers that are in a state of ruptures? Lastly, this research contributes to reimagining interdisciplinary work and highlights the urgency of hydrosocial praxis: the ethical and political engagement with how water is known, lived, imagined, and governed. The bucket continues to leak.