Between Wor(l)ds: Translingual Methods for Reimagining Water

As border-crossing entities, both language and water are polylocal. As languages migrate, travel, mobilize, and transform, speech communities sedimenting voices across environments, waters surge, seep, re-route and cycle, crossing hydrosocial territories and jurisdictional partitions. Yet the governance of transboundary waters, paradoxically, also requires levels of agreement on what makes up a better way forward in the face of increasing scarcity, language loss, pollution, and uneven water realities—one of the most urgent challenges of the twenty first century (Castro 2007; Norman & Bakker 2015). While water governance approaches such as Integrated Water Resource Governance (IWRG) and Adaptive Water Resource Governance (AWRG) offer important groundwork, less attention has been paid to language practices that navigate the ongoing translations at the interplay between fluidity, flux, fixity, and the situated, ontological legibility of the hydrocommons (Neimanis, 2018; Buenafe et al 2024): what much artistic commons research has called ‘emplaced relational translation’ (Imhoff and Quirós 2015; De Carli et al 2025).
Thinking with these challenges, this workshop—inspired by Franch I Gilabert, Luzárraga, and Muiño’s 100 Words for Water (2025) and by Simon on translation’s border-work (2019)—invites participants to choose a water body, write from their embodied relation to it, and translate it through a quick collective assemblage (re-voicing across languages and senses) before coining a new “water word” for a shared mini-glossary by the end. Sharing is optional; no recording; any traces enter a consent-based ethical archive by explicit choice.