Graduate Students from Water Seminar (Geography 5100) “The politics of water” present together at CU WASH Symposium 2026

Gabriela Rocha Sales — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 15:48:51 +0000

Graduate Students from Water Seminar (Geography 5100) “The politics of water” present together at CU WASH Symposium 2026 Gabriela Rocha Sales Tue, 04/28/2026 - 09:48

In Professor Truelove’s Fall 2025 graduate water seminar, GEOG 5100: The Politics of Water, students (Em Wright, Laine Sullivan, Anshul Sharma, Marc Sailer, Zach Schaad), spanning social, physical, and engineering sciences engaged with hydrosocial approaches to understand some of the world’s most pressing water challenges. During the course of the seminar, students from differing disciplines began reflecting on their own lived experiences of water as not simply being something tied to only the physical, infrastructural, or technical, but also the social, cultural, political, and economic – what social scientists often refer to as “socio-natural.” Further, students critically considered how one’s own disciplinary silo could often limit the ways we see, approach, know, and seek to address global water challenges. For example, dominant approaches to pervasive water problems often focus on improving water access and security through technocratic and engineering fixes that are widely viewed as apolitical. At the same time, academic analyses often view water problems through a singular disciplinary lens with limited success, which also simultaneously curbs the scope of how we approach water’s complex challenges. At the conclusion of the course, students had offered such a high degree of personal, professional, and disciplinary reflection on the need to adopt a transdisciplinary approach that recognizes water’s hydro-social nature that the entire class joined together with the aim to continue to work together despite the semester ending. On the last day of the semester, the class agreed to put transdisciplinary thinking into practice by working across students’ own disciplinary orientations and drawing on the collective learning from the semester to co-author and co-present a think piece on the possibilities and imperatives of interdisciplinary approaches to global water challenges.

As a result, the following semester the entire class met again regularly. This time it was not for credit, but to collaborate and be mentored by Professor Truelove in thinking through a framework for transdisciplinary approaches to water challenges and justice, presenting at the CU 2026 Water, Sanitation, and Hygiene (WASH) Symposium, as well as working on a co-authored article for publication. In the collective work of graduate students from Geography, Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences, and the Mortensen Center for Global Engineering, the CU WASH Symposium presentation (pictured below) entailed the students and Professor Truelove sharing the stage to engage a predominately engineering audience on how transdisciplinary approaches could advance water justice. The group presented and answered audience questions for a total of 30 minutes. The presentation advocated for an approach that attends to 1) the “humanness” of water systems, 2) differing ways of knowing and valuing water, 3) expanding how we understand and engage the right to water, and 4) centering communities’ and indigenous experiences’ of water in pursuing climate justice in order to achieve greater water equity and justice globally.

The team is eagerly continuing the work into the summer through their co-authored think piece around similar themes.

From left to right: Em Wright, Anshul Sharma, Yaffa Truelove, Marc Sailer, Laine Sullivan, Zach Schaad

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