Dancing Urban Waters. A Posthuman Feminist Perspective on Arts-Based Practice for Sustainable Education

The chapter explores how arts-based practices informed by posthuman feminism can contribute to expanding ways of learning and knowing about sustainability. Posthuman feminism relocates agency from the human subject to heterogenous assemblages of humans and nonhumans and anchors subjectivity to the body and materiality. From a pedagogical perspective, this means subverting the traditional approaches rooted in the reproduction of a given area of knowledge and taking all materialities, including the body, into account in the learning process as a way of becoming with the world. The authors set up a workshop in which they mobilise creative dance in order to explore different approaches to urban water, in particular flooding, with students of industrial engineering. The students explore the materialities involved in urban flooding through corporeal interactions and creative tasks. They physically experience becoming bodies of water, encountering and intra-acting with “hard”, protective infrastructures as well as more sustainable solutions under the new paradigm “more room for water”. Through these bodily practices, the students multiply the ways of experiencing connectedness with urban water beyond control and mastery as part of a watery subjectivity. The experiment and methodology also contribute to the conversation on post-qualitative research in the framework of a posthumanist epistemology of practice