Hydrography is conventionally understood as the study of large bodies of water, with a special focus on their physical properties, depth, the shape of their underwater terrain, and their implications for navigation. Hydrographies, in contrast, puts forth a broader perspective to consider how those material features and phenomena can be understood through the lived experience of those who inhabit those waterscapes. Accordingly, the study of water here is not confined to scientific inquiry alone. It necessarily considers the production of other narratives created by the people who directly experience and explain the abrupt transformations of waterscapes, and the power relations and injustices that emerge in those environments. Navigation involves the quotidian journeys of humans across bodies of water, political economies, and social relations. Through navigation, these people seek to make a living and connect with other humans and places, aquatic organisms and the other hydrological and geological phenomena that shape those itineraries. Hydrographies, therefore, is both a theoretical and a methodological project. While it seeks to reflect on the experience of life in uneven, shifting, and contested waterscapes, it also builds a transdisciplinary framework to study human-water relationships in an unstable world.
