They Are Bleeding Us: Following Water Through Infrastructure, Value, Scarcity and Protest in Jordan

The Center for Migration and Refugee Studies at The American University in Cairo invites you to an engaging lecture on the social life of water in Jordan.

In this talk, Fred Wojnarowski, British Academy postdoctoral research fellow in the Department of Anthropology at the London School of Economics, develops the central argument of his book project through an ethnographic journey that follows water across the infrastructures and moral worlds it links. It takes the titular claim—made by a farmer-activist in the poor, marginalized rural district of Dhiban in central Jordan—as an entry point into the social life of water under conditions of anticipated and discursively produced scarcity and uneven experiences of socio-ecological breakdown.

Beginning in Dhiban, Wojnarowski shows how scarcity is encountered less as a national hydrological fact than as lived politics of uneven distribution, infrastructural breakdown, contamination and wastewater controversies, shaped by changing state hydraulic missions and international flows of finance and expertise. He follows the water outward through the hydro-social metabolism that links rural wells, dams, pipelines, tanker markets and urban supply, revealing how different communities are differentially protected, disciplined or sacrificed by the same system.

Wojnarowski argues that these contested flows are also regimes of value in motion, tied to the shifting ways water is made meaningful and governable: as commons and moral obligation, as a right and distributive claim, as a priced service and as a quasi-commodity shaped by abstraction and financialization. These regimes coexist and collide, and their collisions generate a distinctive form of agrarian environmental politics. In Dhiban, activists repoliticize water through idioms of corruption and distributional justice, reframing scarcity as a question of sovereignty and harm. In a moment when the technopolitics of international environmental "fixes" is unraveling and under attack from multiple directions, such a perspective might prove a salutary unsettling of our environmental narratives.