water

As part of the annual conference of the Association of Social Anthropologists of the UK and Commonwealth (ASA), this panel discusses the relations between humans and water, and how the precious vitality of water is constituted, negotiated and strategically used.

The general conference theme is "Vital powers and politics: human interactions with living things" and therefore very relevant for critical approaches to environmental management.

Since June 2011, available by Springer Publishers, is our recent collection of studies all addressing the limits to managing the environment1. We employ five case studies to engage with several dimensions of how environmental management practice and discourse is constrained.

• 1. Lippert, Ingmar. Limits to Managing the Environment In Implementing Environmental and Resource Management, Edited by M. Schmidt, V. Onyango and D. Palekhov. Heidelberg: Springer, 2011.

Franz works at the Countryside and Community Research Institute, UK, in a project on Flood memories and community resilience. He is also an Honorary Research Fellow at the Department of Anthropology, University of Aberdeen, UK. In 2010, he was awarded a PhD for his research on uses and meanings of the Kemi River in Finnish Lapland, and the mutual influences of river dwellers and river.