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University of California Press

Fighting for the River

Gender, Body, and Agency in Environmental Struggles
by Özge Yaka (Author)
Hardcover Paperback eBook
Price: $29.95 / £25.00
Publication Date: Jul 2023
Edition: 1st Edition
Title Details:
Rights: World
Pages: 248
ISBN: 9780520393622
Trim Size: 6 x 9
Illustrations: 3 b/w illustrations; 2 maps; 1 table
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About the Book

Fighting for the River portrays women's intimate, embodied relationships with river waters and explores how those relationships embolden local communities' resistance to private run-of-the-river hydroelectric power plants in Turkey. Building on extensive ethnographic research, Özge Yaka develops a body-centered, phenomenological approach to women's environmental activism and combines it with a relational ontological perspective. In this way, the book pushes beyond the "natural resources" frame to demonstrate how our corporeal connection to nonhuman entities is constitutive of our more-than-human lifeworld. Fighting for the River takes the human body as a starting point to explore the connection between lived experience and nonhuman environments, treating bodily senses and affects as the media of more-than-human connectivity and political agency. Analyzing local environmental struggles as struggles for coexistence, Yaka frames human-nonhuman relationality as a matter of socio-ecological justice.

About the Author

Özge Yaka is Senior Researcher at the Institute of Geographical Sciences, Freie Universität Berlin.

Table of Contents

Contents

List of Illustrations 
Abbreviations 
Acknowledgments 

Introduction: Gender, Body, and Relationality in
the Struggle for the Environmental Commons 

1. Saving “God’s Water”: Motivations and Dynamics of the Anti-HEPP Struggle 
2. Resources, Livelihoods, Lifeworld: Linking Gender and Environment through the Lived Body 
3. Sense, Affect, Emotion: Bodily Experiences of River Waters and Emergent Political Agency 
4. Place, Body, Memory: River Waters and the Immanence of the Past in the Present 
5. Ethics, Ontology, Relationality: Grassroots Environmentalism and the Notion of 
Socio-Ecological Justice
Conclusion: Toward an Ecological Approach to Lifeworld, Sociality, and Agency 

Appendix 
Notes 
References 
Index

Reviews

"Yaka’s empirical materials are a rich ground to explore a Turkish discursive environmental politics involving imaginaries and invocations of the law, the state, and the nation, and rural/urban distinctions, all refracted through gendered and class positionalities. The book also offers a nuanced theoretical elaboration of contemporary research on environmental justice, presenting a relational ontological approach that emphasizes the social, corporeal, and existential embeddedness of humans and nonhumans, thus going beyond frameworks of economic and cultural valuations and dichotomies of ecology versus environment. Overall, this monograph should be required reading for scholars of environmental governance and politics in Turkey and the Middle East and, beyond the region, environmental anthropologists, environmental sociologists, political ecologies, and scholars in the wider environmental humanities and social sciences."
— H-Net
"Özge Yaka has written a beautiful book: ethnographically rich, theoretically innovative, emotionally profound. Fighting for the River is a must-read for feminists, environmentalists, students of Turkey and of neoliberalism–for all who seek to integrate history and body, activism and affect, critique and empathetic understanding."—Nancy Fraser, New School for Social Research

"A compelling and important account of environmental struggle. In Fighting for the River, Yaka develops an original approach to thinking lifeworlds as embodied, emergent, relational, and political."—James Ash, Reader in Technology, Space and Society, Newcastle University 

"It is vital today to understand the true impact of development projects like hydroelectric dams on both the local ecology and the human community. Even more vital is to uncover the genuine, lived experience of such interventions. Yaka interweaves high-powered academic research, embodied knowledge, and firsthand narratives to reveal the real story behind the search for socio-ecological justice in energy production. This book is a must-read for both academics and anyone interested in our common future."—Ingrid Leman Stefanovic, editor of The Wonder of Water and Ethical Water Stewardship.

"Yaka's inspiring book transports us into the lifeworlds of ordinary women in rural Turkey. Business attempts to dam nearby rivers sparked these women into extraordinary acts of political activism. Yaka shows how their deep ties to water and land lent them the courage to take on powerful outside interests."—Noel Castree, Professor of Geography, University of Manchester

"Fighting for the River rethinks grassroots environmental activism by starting from the myriad relations that bodies have with human and nonhuman others and environments. Putting recent relational scholarship including feminist phenomenology and ecological thinking into dialogue with long-term empirical work on grassroots environmental groups in Turkey resisting hydropower development, the book explores how the demand and desire for socio-ecological justice emerges through deeply affective entanglements with water and other nonhumans. Rivers are revealed to be companions to women's lives, inseparable from a host of affective responses, sensations, and felt emotions. The result is a profound, moving meditation on how we might better coexist with others in times of ecological crisis and struggle. In its passionate care for how worlds are built with others, the book demonstrates how relational thinking might help us to rethink today's pressing ecological problems."—Ben Anderson, Professor of Geography, Durham University