Water Talks Series n°5 - Dr. F. Menga
The Geneva Water Hub is proud to welcome you to the 5th edition of the Water Talk Series, on Thursday 25 April, between 19:00 and 21:30, RTS building, Quai Ernest-Ansermet 20, in Geneva. This series is an open-speech opportunity for researchers to expose and explain their ideas, their stances on contemporary challenges linked to water governance. The presentations, short and impactful, are in English.
Dr Filippo Menga is a Lecturer in Human Geography at the University of Reading, where he carries out interdisciplinary research exploring the interplay between humans and the environment. His research draws on political ecology, political geography, and critical geography to advance an innovative approach to the study of water politics, particularly in relation to hydraulic infrastructure and the hydropower sector, the dialectics of sustainability, and the interplay between nationalism and water conflicts. Filippo is also Associate Editor of Political Geography, and in 2018 he was awarded the Scopus Early Career Researcher UK Award 2018 (Elsevier/US-UK Fulbright Commission) in recognition of outstanding research in Social Sciences.
Dams and the nation-state across space and time
In this presentation I discuss the role of large-scale water infrastructure in state-building and nation-building processes, exploring two intertwined themes. The first theme concerns the development of hydraulic infrastructure as a technique for the consolidation of different state imaginaries. The second theme examines how the construction and purpose of large dams is subject to a variety of internal and external drivers and global developments that are historically produced and mobilised.
