Waterscape Epistemologies, Waves of Knowing and Translanguaging as Wet Ontology

Translanguaging has been framed from a variety of political, educational, and decolonial perspectives. Most of these approaches, however, are founded in various ways on metaphors and epistemologies grounded in land. In this chapter, we look at watery themes from several directions and their relationships to translanguaging. What has been called “modern water”—the contemporary hydrosocial meaning of water within the Global North—is understood, like language, as an invention, a way of thinking that has only emerged under particular cultural and political conditions. Hydrocolonial relations bring to the fore histories of oceans as sites of colonial control and extraction, the colonization of and through water. Thinking with water is a matter of waterscape epistemologies, or hydrologics, ways of thinking and being in water that question ideas of the individual and of the separability of humans and other creatures. Concerns about ownership of water (hydrocommons) can help us reconsider what it means to have ownership over linguistic resources. Considering the materiality of water (hydromateriality) urges us to reconsider common metaphors around flows and fluidity once we take water as our starting point. We conclude with some suggestions of ways forward for translingual studies from a hydropolitical standpoint. We are interested in examining translanguaging through watery lenses, of asking social, political and material questions through a focus on water, and asking how this can help us think through what is at stake in discussions of language.