ABSTRACT
In recent years, emerging scholarship has advanced embodied approaches to urban water in/security, inequality and infrastructure. This new literature is broadly informed by political ecology studies of water, which critique depoliticized approaches to water scarcity, insecurity and inequality and give attention to the socially differentiated experiences of the urban waterscape. Recent interventions bring feminist and embodied approaches to water’s urban political ecology and analyze the site and scale of the body as critical for understanding everyday urban water access and inequality. Drawing from these frameworks, this chapter summarizes three contributions of an embodied urban political ecology approach for addressing water in/security. These include analytical approaches that give attention to 1) the scale of the body within multi-scalar approaches to water, 2) intersectionality and gender/class/race/ethno-religious relations in shaping patterns of water inequality and insecurity and 3) everyday practices and politics, in relation to both governance and citizens, that reveal under-theorized dimensions of water insecurity and inequality. Embodied approaches to urban water insecurity are poised to expand and deepen work on the everyday politics and lived experiences of insufficient, insecure and unequal water that profoundly shape urban life for city dwellers.
