Glazer, Emilie Werbner; (2023) Unsettling Water: Traces of care across the water infrastructure of Jerusalem. Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London).

Text Emilie Glazer Thesis Edited Version.pdf - Published Version Access restricted to UCL open access staff until 1 August 2025. Download (17MB)

Abstract

This thesis examines water infrastructure in Jerusalem, and its entanglement with multiple modalities of care, environmental relations, and forms of violence across and beyond the city. The ethnography is situated in a region where water is political – as a tool of control, in the term water apartheid, in negotiations for peace. Meanwhile, Israeli water managers promise the solutions to a global water crisis. At the Jerusalem water utility, the Gihon, desalinated water from the Mediterranean Sea runs through pipes, water biochemistry is monitored in real-time, piloted technologies are exported across the world, and environmental scientists claim to deliver the best water quality in the country. But in Palestinian Jerusalemite households, water is a burden. I follow these flows of water, and trace their affective and material consequences, in a city whose environmental politics are concealed by the occupation, even as they are deeply interwoven. What emerges is a landscape where water generates diverse, interacting, practices of care. Care surfaces in water quality monitoring at the Gihon lab, to keep water healthy and safe; it overlaps with strategies of protection which connect to regimes of surveillance and securitisation; it lives in collective Palestinian stories of springs; it runs across the lobbying of Israeli water activists, and the labour of Palestinian farmers who follow patterns of rain. Modalities of care displace one another, so that care becomes a tool for social reproduction, dispossession, liberation, and refusal. Care with and for water mobilises imposed imaginaries of the future, active memories of past lives, and lines of sovereignty redrawn. Attention to these traces offers a vantage point to examine the politics of environmental relations in Jerusalem, and the questions of justice that they encompass, in the wider context of the settler-colonial state, and the geological time of the Anthropocene.

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