Like most rivers, Tigris begins as a tiny stream, winding through the folds of the Taurus Mountains. As it emerges from Lake Hazar, a rift lake nestled among alpine peaks, the flow of melting snow and rainwater trickles down rocky slopes and carves valleys. Over geologic time, erosion widens channels, loosens rock and soil, slows the current, and the Tigris River begins to meander. In the Late Miocene, together with the Euphrates, Tigris forms a river system that shapes and frames the land that would become Mesopotamia—“the land between two rivers”1—within this region known as the Fertile Crescent. As the two rivers course southeast, they join as the Shatt al-Arab and empty into the Persian Gulf.
The Euphrates River in Elazig, Turkey. Courtesy of SALT Araştırma–SALT Research, Elazığ Archive.
The history of rivers is shaped by tectonic shifts and hydrological cycles across geologic time. Rivers are not merely conduits of life; they are also central to the formation of civilizations. They organize matter, redistribute nutrients, and make soils fertile, ultimately enabling sedentary agriculture. Tigris and Euphrates in particular structured the emergence of some of the first complex societies in history and their technological innovations, including the first irrigation systems. Thousands of years later, these same technologies would come to govern the region’s flows of water, geological resources, and fluvial life, Euphrates and Tigris themselves becoming transformed and managed by the infrastructures of industrialization, urbanization, and modernization—along with their attendant ideologies. The power dynamics embedded in these flows course as networks of dispossession, displacement, oppression, and extraction, sedimenting as ecological and social violence, accumulating in both the currencies of capital and currents of water, and mobilizing the flux of sand, sediment, stone.
This essay practices a “fluvial” reading and mode of writing to interrogate the development of infrastructures of energy and water management on the bodies of Tigris—where “fluvial” is both the framework and object. Fluvial, from fluere, means “to flow,” and in geologic terms, it refers to the processes “of or relating to rivers.”2 Through this mode of inquiry, I understand materiality and histories—and the historicity of matter—as dynamic, flowing, intertwined, and plural. The shape of this essay too is a river; it poses meandering as a structure and methodology to offer more-than-linguistic fluencies,3 stressing the importance of weaving and reading different histories—such as geological and geopolitical—in parallel. Fluvial is therefore at once a site, a method, and a critical inquiry. Anchoring Tigris at its center, the essay meanders between hydropower’s various formations—infrastructural, institutional, political, economic, discursive, and national—through a relational, dynamic, and feminist lens.
Geology Has Its Entropy Too
We live in a world populated by structures—a complex mixture of geological, biological, social, and linguistic constructions that are nothing but accumulations of materials shaped and hardened by history. — Manuel DeLanda, A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History4
Bas Princen, Reservoir (Concrete Rundown), 2005. Courtesy of the artist.
Liberated and leaking in a dynamic state of spill, what appears to be the remnant of an abandoned concrete infrastructure is flooding and pouring, out of an attempt at capture. Losing its edges, beginnings, and endings, it flows like the water that would once have run through its gates. Amid the mountainous landscape, the concrete solidifies and dissolves into the rocky terrain, as if the earth’s crust were slowly cooling and hardening.
In the 2005 photograph Reservoir (Concrete Rundown), the artist and photographer Bas Princen captures a dried-out reservoir on the Los Angeles River—an encounter resulting from “follow[ing] the water backwards,” to the outskirts of the city, where Princen positions the city’s relation to water and, accordingly, its infrastructures.5 In conversation with Princen, Marc Pimlott describes the complexity of the scene:
I can’t tell what I am looking at: nature or [hu]man-made environment; construction or destruction; nature, artifice, or something else; something being made, something falling apart or something in between.6
I begin with Princen’s photograph because through these conflations it presents a precise moment of collision between the themes and objects I wish to gather. The relations and dynamics of hydropower emerge as the edges between mountain and infrastructure dissolve, and the leaking body of concrete recalls and almost returns to the watery flow it was conceived to master. To further outline the broader geological and environmental implications of this study, Princen’s Concrete Rundown needs to be studied in parallel with the artist Robert Smithson’s Asphalt Rundown (1969).
Robert Smithson, Asphalt Rundown, Sculptural Event, Cava dei Selce, Rome, Italy, 1969. Asphalt, earth. Copyright Holt/Smithson Foundation, licensed by Artists Rights Society, New York.
In the earliest of his earthworks, Smithson pours a truckload of hot asphalt down an embankment at the site of a quarry. Capturing the asphalt in a midflow, fluid state as it journeys down and hardens on the slope, Smithson frames it as another “frozen” layer of the geological and temporal stratifications of the Earth. Smithson’s spills, Asphalt Rundown and Glue Pour, most evidently deal with the notion of entropy that foregrounds the irreversibility of processes that are also inescapably material. Smithson describes mine reclamation, for instance, as “an attempt to recover a frontier or a wilderness that no longer exists”7—insisting on a notion of materiality wherein matter is acting, changing, and agglomerating.8 “In other words,” Smithson writes, “if we consider the earth in terms of geologic time, we end up with what we call fluvial entropy.” He continues, “geology has its entropy too, where everything is gradually wearing down.”9
Concrete Rundown’s compositional and conceptual engagement with Smithson’s entropy highlights the importance of presenting histories of urbanization, modernization, and architecture as extensions of geologic time. The compounding crises of environmental collapse and social injustice emerge from the accelerated deployment of materials and energy—such as the production of concrete10—driven by the intensification of human activity at the infrastructural scale, namely through large-scale urban development and energy generation projects like dams. Concrete also offers a critical entry point for interrogating material architectures of energy infrastructures, not as static forms but as ongoing and active materializations of historical processes solidified by geological formations, discursive productions,11 and material agencies.
In Concrete and Culture: A Material History, the architectural historian Adrian Forty studies how concrete eludes easy classification and the binaries that seemingly shape our understanding of the world: “liquid/solid, smooth/rough, natural/artificial, ancient/modern, base/spirit.”12 Rather, through the togethering of earth’s materials, concrete exists in a state of “becoming”: “The concrete of modern buildings and infrastructures does not exist prior to the arrival of the constituent ingredients… at one place… and it is only at the moment when human labor combines them together that they become concrete.”13 Concrete, argues Forty, then “can be more accurately described as a process than as a material.”14
“Concrete Pour” at the Sarıyar Dam construction site, Ankara, Turkey, 1955. Courtesy of SALT Araştırma–SALT Research, Ankara Archive.
This identification, however, that brings “material” and “process” so close together, so incredibly close that they almost collapse into each other, also pulls them farther apart. This separation into two distinct categories suggests one can be either material or process. In moving forward a “fluvial” approach to our perception of (material) reality, I stress countering such linguistic binaries—like material vs. process—in favor of recognizing matter itself as a process.
To borrow from the clarity of the feminist theorist and quantum physicist Karen Barad, matter is “not a thing, but a doing,”15 or, as Diana Coole and Samantha Frost similarly argue: “‘matter becomes’ rather than ‘matter is.’”16 As such, concrete is at once a mineral on the earth’s crust, the liquid slurry poured into a mold, the calcination of cement, dust in a worker’s lung, and sand on a riverbed.
Material-histories of Tigris
In a very real sense, reality is a single matter-energy undergoing phase transitions of various kinds, with each new layer of accumulated “stuff” simply enriching the reservoir of nonlinear dynamics… Rocks and winds, germs and words, are all different manifestations of this dynamic material reality… different ways in which this single matter-energy expresses itself. —Manuel DeLanda, A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History17
To write materialities in flows and transformations requires a notion of history that is embedded in and entangled with materiality. As Barad reminds us, matter “does not require the mark of an external force like culture or history to complete it. Matter is always already an ongoing historicity.”18 This mode of inquiry inspires the hyphen that I draw between “material-histories,” akin to Barad’s “material-discursive”19 (or Donna Haraway’s “material-semiotic”), to emphasize their inseparability.
To thicken this hyphen, I turn to the writer and philosopher Manuel DeLanda, whose philosophical approach to writing history presents a historical narrative that is “geological,” and energizes my own. In A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History, DeLanda weaves together geological, biological, and linguistic worlds through the lens of historic formations—what he refers to as “shared historical processes of materialization.”
For DeLanda, this mode of geological history “concerns itself exclusively with dynamical elements (energy flows, nonlinear causality) that we have in common with rocks and mountains and other nonliving historical structures.”20 Writing biological processes in parallel with geological ones, DeLanda insists that “we need to know [matter’s] history to understand its current dynamical state.”21 The process of mineralization, for example, typically encountered within the field of geology, is in the organic world too:
The human endoskeleton was one of the many products of that ancient mineralization. Yet that is not the only geological infiltration that the human species has undergone. About eight thousand years ago, human populations began mineralizing again when they developed an urban exoskeleton: bricks of sun-dried clay became the building materials for their homes, which in turn surrounded and were surrounded by stone monuments and defensive walls. This exoskeleton served a purpose similar to its internal counterpart: to control the movement of human flesh in and out of a town’s walls.22
Humans have similarly devised technologies to control the movement of water, and the construction of these technologies relies on and traces back to the formation of rivers and histories of extraction. Limestone is the underlying rock in the Taurus Mountains; it is also the same sedimentary rock that is blasted and dislodged from earth’s surface in the making of concrete. Limestone is formed through the crystallization of calcium carbonate and is broken down to calcium oxide (CaO) and carbon dioxide (CO₂) in the thermal process of calcination during the making of cement. The shared mineral origin of concrete and mountains is what makes the cement industry one of the largest emitters of anthropogenic greenhouse gases.23
Similarly, sand, the second most exploited resource in the world after water,24 is also a component of concrete. Among other sources, such as oceans and deserts, riverbeds provide the most suitable sand for aggregate. The sand grains’ angular shape allows them to interlock, strengthening the cement-aggregate mix. Massive amounts of sand are being extracted from rivers to satisfy the rising demand for concrete production. Sand mining collapses riverbanks, deepens riverbeds, and sinks deltas.
12,000-year-old town of Hasankeyf before it was flooded. Photograph by Stefan Michel, courtesy of rivernet.org.
Manuel DeLanda writes that the change in human societies toward more complex urban systems—the “urban morphogenesis”—depended on “the intensification of the consumption of nonhuman energy.”25 DeLanda discusses “the great increase in the flow of matter-energy through society” from its ancient beginnings in the Fertile Crescent, “as well as the transformation in urban form that this intense flow makes possible.”26 From this point of view, DeLanda offers another useful framework: “cities arise from the flow of matter-energy.”27
A microcosm of geological time and human history, Hasankeyf is a 12,000-year-old town in southeastern Turkey with archaeological and architectural traces extending back to the Middle Ages.28 Located at the conjunction of dry lands and abundant freshwater, this ancient settlement forms part of a rich riparian ecosystem between the terrestrial and aquatic worlds: a landscape of deep canyons, humid forests, and sandbanks, a few hundred meters away from the semidesert and calcareous steppe.29 The land is a historical record of biological and ecological processes that have developed these coastal, terrestrial, and marine ecosystems along the Tigris River.
From the earliest forms of life as microscopic organisms over three and a half billion years ago to the formation of human societies, water has been a vital source of life; the rivers and lands of the Fertile Crescent support cultures, agriculture, and trade. Transformations in human societies have depended on rivers and have changed them in return. Beginning with the development of early irrigation systems all the way to the contemporary technologies of water storage and energy generation that appeared more rapidly in the twentieth century, the control of Euphrates and Tigris responded to the intensification of industrialization, urbanization, and modernization.
In 2019, the planned flooding of the Ilısu Dam reservoir commenced, gradually submerging Hasankeyf beneath the rising waters of Tigris. Following the depletion of ecosystems and natural sites on Euphrates as a result of increased damming in the last twenty years, Tigris was the last free river—the last remaining riverine and canyon ecosystem in this region with relatively undisturbed habitats rich in biodiversity.30 For the purposes of hydroelectricity power production, flood control, and water storage, Ilısu Dam has inundated an area of 310 square kilometers, displacing water courses, people, sediments, minerals, and more. This forced mobilization, shared across bodies and life forms, was part of Güneydoğu Anadolu Projesi (GAP, the “Southeastern Anatolia Project”), Turkey’s massive dam-building initiative—subject to political and institutional power, and driven by national modernization, institutional development, and ideologies of expansion and technological progress.
In many senses, this is a story about power and the movement of power.
The Ilısu Dam. Courtesy of Burak Kara / Stringer via Getty Images.
(Hydro)power Relations and Dynamics
The restive waters, the cold wet breath of the fog, are of a world in which man is an uneasy trespasser; he punctuates the night with the complaining groan and grunt of a foghorn, sensing the power and menace of the sea. —Rachel Carson, The Edge of the Sea31
“For the most appalling quality of water is its strength,” writes Nan Shepherd in The Living Mountain, weaving sensations and perceptions with her words. “I love its flash and gleam, its music, its pliancy and grace, its slap against my body; but I fear its strength. I cannot fathom its power.”32 Hydropower is the energy in moving water. It is the power of movement, the kinetic energy generated from the gravitational force of falling water, and also the movement of power—its conversion to electricity, and from hydrological power to political, economic, social, and more.
Thermodynamics teaches us that energy is only converted, transformed from one form to another. A reading of (hydro)power through dynamics is important because it focuses on the movements, changes, and interactions that play out within relations—how power shifts, and how it disempowers some in order to empower others. Barad asks why the focus in many critical discussions of power dynamics is on “what is meant by power and how it operates,” and less, or rarely, on “dynamics.”33 Focusing on the relations and dynamics in power turns our attention to the network of interactions, processes, and mechanisms—the systems that enable the ways in which power is exercised.
There is a lot at stake in the many meanings of (hydro)power. The political, social, and economic forms of power intersect with the flows of energetic, biological, and geological matters. In the conversion of kinetic energy, what other forces are at play? As water runs against the blades, what other bodies are moving besides the spinning turbines? When freely flowing streams are seized to fill the reservoirs, what other lives are contained and trapped? When electricity runs through high-voltage wires into transmission towers and power grids, what kinds of operations and machines do they power? At the infrastructural scale, hydropower moves, floods, displaces, and redistributes material-energies that extend from rocks and sediments to minerals and people, from electrical and energetic to geologic and organic matter.
Construction of Sarıyar Dam showing an open valve, Ankara, Turkey, 1956. Courtesy of SALT Araştırma–SALT Research, Ankara Archive.
While institutional advances in the management of water resources date back to the Ottoman period,34 modern Turkey’s hydropower development can be traced back to the Republic’s founding in 1923 and was heavily influenced by Western models, particularly those of the United States. Even before the establishment of modern Turkey, foreign advisers came to survey the rivers to devise strategies for their utilization.35 By the 1950s, Turkey had formalized its relationship with the US Bureau of Reclamation, sending engineers to Denver for specialized training and solidifying the Bureau’s involvement in shaping Turkey’s water management policies.
In 1954, Turkey founded Devlet Su İşleri (DSİ, “State Hydraulic Works”) as the central government agency navigating the state’s approach to water resources and dam projects. DSİ was, to an extent, as Arda Bilgen notes, modeled after the US Bureau of Reclamation, linking the institutional formation of Turkey’s water policy to broader projects of modernization and the liberalization of Turkey’s economy, which emulated Western ideals.36
This institutional framework reinforced the state’s technocratic approach to water governance, in which rivers were increasingly understood through metrics of efficiency, productivity, and economic and national utility. It catalyzed new basin surveys and systematic assessments of Turkey’s energy and irrigation potential. Earlier initiatives, such as the establishment of the Administration for Electricity in 1936, further accelerated geological and topographical studies, particularly with the Keban Dam proposal in the same year. The proliferation of measurement tools, such as observation stations along riverbanks, rendered rivers as profitable and controllable objects, shaping knowledge production and narratives that water and its currents are in service to the nation’s development—and thus to its socioeconomic status and global prestige.
Çubuk Dam, decorated with national flags of Turkey, Ankara, Turkey. Courtesy of SALT Araştırma–SALT Research, Ankara Archive.
In “Unimagined Communities,” Rob Nixon observes how “iconic structures of monumental modernity,” in the case of developing nations, “serve to concretize the idea… [of] ‘catching up,’ as evidenced by spectacular, televisable, soaring feats of world-class engineering.”37 For Nixon, “each dam [is] simultaneously an act of national self-assertion—independence writ large across the landscape—and an act of natural conquest.”38
The completion of the Keban Dam in 1974 marked a significant milestone, leading to the establishment of GAP. While GAP was initially aimed at developing water and land resources in Turkey’s southeast, over time, the government project grew to encompass irrigation, agriculture, hydraulic energy, and rural and urban infrastructure, as well as forestry, education, and health. Spanning more than 75,000 square kilometers across nine provinces and serving a population of 8.5 million, GAP envisioned the construction of twenty-two dams and nineteen hydroelectric power plants on Tigris and Euphrates.
GAP is a striking example of how conquest is legitimized through narratives of “development.” In How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, the historian Walter Rodney argues that development is not a neutral process but rather one of exploitation, shaped by historical power imbalances and capitalist motives. Rodney further highlights how resources from “underdeveloped” regions are often extracted to benefit more powerful entities rather than the local population whose land these projects are constructed on.39 Despite GAP’s portrayal as developing the southeastern region,40 its benefits flow disproportionately, not toward the “underdeveloped” but toward the interests of the state and private stakeholders.
Following the Flows, from Capital to Sediment
The flows of global power meet the flows of biomatter. —Astrida Neimanis, “Hydrofeminism: Or, On Becoming a Body of Water”41
A fluvial reading follows the movement—of capital and sediments, governing bodies and microbodies—to trace how these flows intersect, accelerate, and are redirected through infrastructure. Large capital investments in southeastern Anatolia course like water in an intricate entanglement of state ambitions, private interests, and environmental transformation.
In 2011, the government leased the “usage rights” of rivers to private companies for the next forty-nine years through an amendment to the Turkish Electricity Market Act, effectively privatizing the ownership of electricity production.42 The Ilısu Dam, as one example, is shared among three private companies. The leader, Nurol İnşaat, holds an overall share of 32 percent and serves as the lead contractor as part of the consortium that built the dam.43
The environmental studies scholar Janine MacLeod writes that “watery language naturalizes the movements of capital,” that, for instance, everyday metaphors like “flows of capital” “imply that the circulation of wealth is as fundamental to the maintenance of life as the blood flowing through the veins of vascularized creatures.”44 MacLeod’s eco-political reading demonstrates that capital, like water, is made to flow in particular directions to sustain power. Following this current reveals how the mobilization of wealth is the commodification of water itself, “quite literally flow[ing] as capital.”
Beginning in 1996, the Turkish government failed three times to launch the construction of the Ilısu Dam due to lack of investor interest and the withdrawal of foreign loans and credit agencies in the absence of proper environmental assessment reports. In 2010, the government finally announced that the project would be funded by public and private national bank loans.45 The 2026 budget of the GAP Regional Development Administration under the Ministry of Industry and Technology was approved by the General Assembly of the Turkish Grand National Assembly in December 2025: a sum of 496 billion lira will flow into the GAP Action Plan, covering the 2024–2028 period.46
The reverse of a Turkish banknote (One Million Turkish Lira) in circulation from 2005–2010 featuring the Ataturk Dam.
The government, through GAP, casts electricity generation as a project promising regional growth and national autonomy, while folding the region into broader circuits of extraction and depletion.47 The dams produce far more energy than local consumption needs, and the distance to Turkey’s Marmara region in the northwest, where industrial activity is concentrated, is far beyond the dam’s transmission range. Dicle Tuba Kılıç, director of the Birdlife Foundation in Turkey, notes that the electricity powers air conditioning along the Mediterranean coast and fuels quarrying and extractive industries—such as gold mining—that are widespread in southeast Anatolia.48 Development, in this sense, is a promise that circulates without ever reaching the communities it purports to serve and instead sustains extraction for consumers elsewhere.
When the Ilısu Dam flooded the entire town of Hasankeyf, GAP displaced over 80,000 of the local population. While the state promoted “Yeni Hasankeyf” (“New Hasankeyf”) as a modern replacement settlement49 provided by the local municipality, the resettlement and compensation plans were poorly executed. Most families, separated from their land, lost their property rights and livelihood in the forced relocation. The state failed to adequately compensate for physical and land assets, and delays in the resettlement process forced the displaced to live in tents for more than fifteen months without electricity or sufficient water.50 The Expropriation Law and Resettlement Law made the locals even more vulnerable through eligibility limitations, such as recognizing only nuclear families for resettlement, excluding the majority of the residents whose homes and land were unregistered, and obliging others to take out loans when the cost of new housing exceeded the value of the expropriated property.51
Infrastructure here functioned not only as a technical or economic intervention but also as a form of political power, one that exerted social and ethnic organization, revealing who is expendable in the name of development. Situated near Turkey’s borders with Syria and Iraq, the Ilısu Dam not only reduced flow to those downstream countries52 but also affected a predominantly Kurdish population, Turkey’s largest ethnic minority, and the vast majority of the local population in the southeast.53
Along with this forced displacement, the 2017 internal displacement report notes that GAP also intensified the militarization of both the dam and the wider region: By February 2015, the government had deployed soldiers at the construction site amid ongoing security concerns tied to the project’s political and territorial implications.54 As a recent 2025 article in Upstream Journal argues, dam construction “brought periphery communities under tighter control of the state”: “By controlling water, the state can exert influence over the Kurdish population and strengthens its authority in a region where it historically has struggled to maintain control.”55
Hasankeyf’s flooding was not an inevitable consequence of the dam’s construction. In an extensive technical and hydro-meteorological topographical study, Sahnaz Tigrek and Emrah Yalcin proposed a five-dam system in place of one mega-dam, explaining how alternative schemes—such as lowering the crest elevation or distributing the dam across multiple smaller sites—would fulfill the same energy output without submerging the town.56
Hasankeyf after it is flooded to become the Ilısu Dam Reservoir, October 2019. Courtesy of Burak Kara / Stringer via Getty Images.
The myth of development takes other forms too. Hydropower is advertised as clean, green energy, based solely on the fact that hydroelectric generation doesn’t directly burn fossil fuels. Yet when dams flood downstream forests, excess water pushes onto riverbanks where soft vegetation—grass, leaves, and other biomass—accumulates in sediments behind the concrete walls. Microbes and bacteria beneath the surface feast on this organic matter, and the resulting decomposition releases methane—a greenhouse gas around 80 times more potent than carbon dioxide over a twenty-year period.57 The emission rate of methane is increasing exponentially, with methane accounting for roughly 30 percent of global warming since preindustrial times.58And while hydropower itself may not emit carbon dioxide, the quantity of concrete poured into these mega-structures is far from negligible. The production of cement not only requires significant amounts of energy to reach reaction temperatures of up to 1450 degrees Celsius, but 60 percent of carbon dioxide emitted in this process is produced by the thermal breakdown of limestone.59
The harms embedded in the acceleration of urbanization and ideologies of progress also materialize in the movements of sediments. In their research on earth’s sediments, the geologist Jaia Syvitski notes the growing human impact on sediment flux in rivers due to dam construction in the last several decades.60 While human activity has increased erosion and sediment transport, dams have simultaneously prevented sediment from reaching coasts. The sedimentary buildup within reservoirs has multiple effects, including the decay of concrete itself. “Over 100 billion metric tons of sediment and 1–3 billion metric tons of carbon are now sequestered in reservoirs,” Syvitski writes, “constructed largely within the past 50 years.”61
In the absence of a proper environmental impact assessment report, the independent review prepared by Doğa Derneği (“BirdLife Foundation”) outlines the areas where the current EIAR fails to comply with one of the main policy documents (World Bank Operational Policy on Environmental Assessment) for the project.62 The review shows a devastating inability to compensate for the loss of biodiversity resulting from the project: the permanent loss of the natural riparian ecosystem and other associated habitats of a river course of over 170 km, and of four internationally recognized Important Bird Areas (IBAs). As the ecosystems’ biological communities are formed mainly by native plant and animal species, many—such as the Euphrates soft-shell turtle, the red-wattled plover, and the pied kingfisher—will permanently disappear due to the flooding of their nesting sites and habitats.
While operating as an infrastructure for water generation, not all water is generated equally—in other words, hydropower has a water footprint too. As dams increase the surface area of collected water, a lot more water that is exposed to air and direct sunlight evaporates from these artificial lakes than from the flowing river. When reservoirs trap these currents, they also starve them of nutrients. Despite their intended use for irrigation and agricultural growth, nutrient-deprived reservoir water and microclimate shifts—frosts and humidity—have rendered the land increasingly infertile.
A river is a living water, rich in oxygen and minerals carried by its flow. The cultural studies scholar Astrida Neimanis argues against an abstract reading of water, which at once elides the diversity of water at the same time that it presents it as a limitless resource. Referring to the geographer Jamie Linton’s term “modern water,” Neimanis warns against the “dominant, or natural way of knowing or relating to water, originating in Western Europe and North America,” that impacts our water imaginaries: “All water is made known as an abstract, isomorphic, measurable quantity, all reducible to that fundamental unit H₂O.”63
Fluvial Feminisms
Something ends when it can no longer contain itself: the compulsion to grow larger, shapeshift, or shed an origin story no longer useful—all of this is way of ending. But ending is sometimes just another word for submerging, or hiding in plain sight. Ending might mean insisting on beginning, again. —Astrida Neimanis, The River Ends as the Ocean
As a way of ending, I turn to another beginning, an epic that imagines an origin story for the Tigris River.64 In this story, Tigris is created by the force of divine inspiration and with the sweep of a prophet’s wand. One day, the prophet Danyal is asked to draw a line on the land, starting from the caves where the river’s headwaters are based. As he walks along, the river shall follow his footsteps. Following his movement, his wand splits the earth to summon water from the mountains. In the meantime, the prophet is told to be careful: he should avoid flooding planes where “the poor, orphans, or the widowed women” live. With this purpose—and with forgiveness—the prophet meanders, diverting and redirecting the water toward the dry, arid lands instead. This intentionality, the story tells, is why Tigris zigzags its way down to the Persian Gulf.
The legend constructs a social imaginary through which the river is perceived: It acknowledges human intentionality and mastery—neatly gendered as male—as the only agency that births the river, makes productive the land, and protects the “vulnerable.”65 The female figure, on the other hand, is portrayed as powerless and passive, in need of protection, just like the land. Water, on the other hand, is not only depicted as a limitless and abstract resource but is also created, at the tip of the wand, by a Man.
The context in which I carry fluvial to feminisms—or feminisms to fluvial—is to stress the interconnected ways in which oppression operates. Fluvial feminisms connect the reduction of the life-giving routes of rivers to their potential of energy—as passive, empty vessels of resources—to broader questions that also concern architecture’s extraction of earth’s materials. “Climate change,” the Australian philosopher Elizabeth Grosz remarks, “the poisoning of the atmosphere, the extinction of countless species, has undoubtedly been effected by those who regulate large amounts of energy, something rarely accessible to most women throughout human history.”66
Fluvial feminisms is in the plural, attending to many oppressive forces and restriction of flows, which are also material. It attends to the flows of sediments, people, animals, waters that are restricted, diverted, or controlled by the materialization of power, and disempowerment that is shared across different bodies—female, fluvial, and beyond. In her hydrofeminist reading, Neimanis similarly expands “feminism’s ecotones” from sexual oppression to the planetary when she writes that “all bodies have reservoirs to be tapped.”67
Construction of the Keban Dam, Elazığ, Turkey. Courtesy of SALT Araştırma–SALT Research, Elazığ Archive.
Elsewhere, Grosz argues for a philosophy of life as a matter of feminist thought and writes, “Freedom is conceived not only or primarily as elimination of constraint or coercion but more positively as the condition of, or capacity for, action in life.” Recognizing the dynamism in materiality is at once a political, ethical, environmental, and feminist question. Grosz’s reframing of freedom and particularly agency, as the (female and feminist subject’s) capacity of making and doing “through its immersion in materiality,” flows in the same direction with the articulation of Barad, who writes:
I have been particularly interested in how matter comes to matter. How matter makes itself felt. This is a feminist project whether or not there are any women or people or any other macroscopic beings in sight.68
It is in this way that fluvial to me is at once a methodology of writing (histories) and a mode of feminist critique. It traces how forms of power, bodies, and life all operate through flow and are likewise dominated through the control or restriction of that flow. To think fluvially is to move with rivers’ currents—in writing histories, imagining materials, or nurturing life, riverine or otherwise; it is for the ways matter insists on its own active, relational, and dynamic agency.
“Ancient name for the land that lies between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers north of Babylon (in modern Iraq), from Greek Mesopotamia (khōra), literally ‘a country between two rivers,’” link. ↩ 1.
fluvial(adj.): "pertaining to a river," from Latin fluvialis "of a river," from fluvius "a river, stream, running water," which is related to fluere "to flow." See (ink: https://www.etymonline.com/word/fluvial text: link). ↩ 1.
The etymology of the word “fluency” also traces to the Latin fluere (“to flow”), to describe that something moves easily and smoothly. While it is applied almost exclusively to language, I’m interested in expanding the meanings of fluency beyond the linguistic framework and back to the rivers and waters that “flow freely.” ↩ 1.
Manuel DeLanda, A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History (New York: Swerve Editions, 2000), 25. ↩ 1.
“Utopian Debris: A Conversation Between Bas Princen and Marc Pimlott,” OASE 76 Specificity (2008): 10. ↩ 1.
“Utopian Debris,” 10. ↩ 1.
Robert Smithson, “Entropy Made Visible,” in Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings, ed. Jack Flam (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 307. ↩ 1.
In their book Formless: A User’s Guide, the authors Yve-Alain Bois and Rosalind Krauss refer to how Smithson often spoke of entropy as “the repressed condition of architecture.” They also write that “the dream of architecture, among other things, is to escape entropy.” In this respect, architecture is described and understood as the solidification of a swarming materiality and the imposition of an ordered form in tension with the notions of turbulence and entropy—which set the ground from which the collapsing outburst of concrete in Princen’s photograph builds upon. Yve-Alain Bois and Rosalind E. Krauss, Formless: A User’s Guide (New York: Zone Books, 1997), 187. In “A Sedimentation of the Mind: Earth Works,” Smithson argues that rust is also the fundamental property of steel, which, as translated into a fear of inactivity, entropy, and erosion, removes us from making an intimate contact with matter, and consequently from understanding and interacting with the world. ↩ 1.
Smithson, “Entropy Made Visible,” 303. ↩ 1.
The concrete chemist and researcher Karen Scrivener explains that “the reason concrete has a big carbon footprint as a whole” is not its environmental impact (in fact, Scrivener notes that if concrete were to be replaced with any other material, it would have much bigger impacts and carbon emissions), but that “there are just such huge quantities used.” (I thank Sarah Nichols, whose work introduced me to this resource.) See James Mitchell Crow, “The Concrete Conundrum,” Chemistry World (February 2008), link. ↩ 1.
While not within the scope of this essay, I’d like to briefly re-stress that discursive productions are separate from the linguistic frameworks, through Barad, who very succinctly posits: “Discourse is not a synonym for language.” Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), 146. ↩ 1.
Adrian Forty, “Natural or Unnatural,” in Forty, Concrete and Culture: A Material History (London: Reaktion Books, 2012), 44. ↩ 1.
Forty, Concrete and Culture, 43–44. ↩ 1.
Forty, Concrete and Culture, 44. ↩ 1.
Karen Barad, “Agential Realism: How Material Discursive Practices Matter,” Meeting the Universe Halfway, 151. ↩ 1.
Diana Coole and Samantha Frost, eds., New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 10. ↩ 1.
DeLanda, A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History, 21. ↩ 1.
Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway, 151. ↩ 1.
Across their work, Barad interlaces matter and meaning, material and discursive into an intimacy arguing that materiality is discursive. Barad defines discourse as “not what is said” but “that which constrains and enables what can be said.” In other words, discourse is the field or condition of possibilities for the production of (disciplinary) knowledge. In this way, “discursive practices produce, rather than merely describe the subjects and objects of knowledge practices.” Barad, “Agential Realism,” 146–147. ↩ 1.
DeLanda, A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History, 20. ↩ 1.
DeLanda, A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History, 4. ↩ 1.
DeLanda, A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History, 26–27. ↩ 1.
“It’s been said that if the cement industry were a country, it would be the world’s third or fourth-largest emitter of carbon dioxide (CO₂). Global cement manufacturing produced 1.6 billion metric tonnes of CO₂ in 2022, the latest year for which there are figures—that’s about 8% of the world’s total CO₂ emissions.” International Energy Agency, Global Energy Review 2025: CO₂ Emissions (Paris: IEA, 2025), 4, link. ↩ 1.
In the 2017 essay “The World Is Running Out of Sand,” David Owen documents the global scarcity of sand, highlighting specifically its industrial demand, like its use in aggregate for concrete and asphalt. These are, in turn, primarily used for projects of urbanization and infrastructural expansion like roads, bridges, and certainly also dams. David Owen, “The World Is Running Out of Sand,” New Yorker, May 22, 2017, link. ↩ 1.
Manuel DeLanda, “Lavas and Magmas,” in A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History (New York: Swerve Editions, 2000), 28. ↩ 1.
DeLanda, “Lavas and Magmas,” 28. ↩ 1.
DeLanda, “Lavas and Magmas,” 28. ↩ 1.
In fact, Hasankeyf is the only town in Anatolia to have survived since the Middle Ages. In addition to being awarded with complete archaeological protection by the Turkish department of culture in 1978, it is also the only site that meets 9 out of 10 criteria for UNESCO’s World Heritage List. See Hasankeyf Matters, link, and Zeynep Ahunbay and Őzge Balkiz, “Outstanding Universal Value of Hasankeyf and the Tigris Valley,” link. ↩ 1.
Ahunbay and Balkiz, “Outstanding Universal Value of Hasankeyf and the Tigris Valley.” ↩ 1.
See Ilısu Dam and HEPP Project – Review of the Environmental Impact Assessment Report, and Ahunbay and Balkiz, “Outstanding Universal Value of Hasankeyf and the Tigris Valley.” ↩ 1.
Rachel Carson, “The Marginal World,” The Edge of the Sea (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1955), 1. ↩ 1.
Nan Shepherd, “Water,” The Living Mountain (Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press, 2019), 22. ↩ 1.
Karen Barad, “Spacetime Re(con)figurings: Natural Cultural Forces and Changing Topologies of Power,” Meeting the Universe Halfway, 233. ↩ 1.
These advances were rooted in the empire’s civilizational project and long-term development visions. See Chris Gratien, “Swamps and the Ottoman Empire’s Civilizing Mission,” Darden Blogs, March 5, 2019, link. ↩ 1.
Arda Bilgen, “Concrete Steps Toward Modernization: Dam-, State-, and Nation-Building in Southeastern Turkey,” in The Routledge Handbook on Contemporary Turkey, ed. Joost Jongerden (London: Routledge, 2021), 300. ↩ 1.
Bilgen, “Concrete Steps Toward Modernization,” 301. ↩ 1.
Rob Nixon, “Unimagined Communities: Developmental Refugees, Megadams and Monumental Modernity,” New Formations 2009, no. 69 (Spring 2010), 151. ↩ 1.
Nixon, “Unimagined Communities,” 166. ↩ 1.
William Finnegan had similarly critiqued that “it is simplistic, even misleading, to talk about whole nations as winners or losers under the current globalization regime, since there are, in every country, significant groups of both winners and losers.” Quoted in Nixon, “Unimagined Communities,” 159. ↩ 1.
On the project’s official website, GAP is described as a “a multi-sectoral integrated regional development project being implemented in 9 provinces (Adıyaman, Batman, Diyarbakır, Gaziantep, Kilis, Mardin, Siirt, Şanlıurfa, Şırnak) in the Southeastern Anatolia Region, one of the relatively underdeveloped regions of Turkey.” GAP’s main objectives are further outlined: “to utilize the resources of the Southeastern Anatolia Region in order to raise the income level and quality of life of the local population, to eliminate the development gap between this region and others, and to contribute to national goals of economic development and social stability by increasing productivity and employment opportunities in rural areas.” See link. ↩ 1.
Astrida Neimanis, “Hydrofeminism: Or, On Becoming a Body of Water,” in Undutiful Daughters: New Directions in Feminist Thought and Practice, ed. Henriette Gunkel, Chrysanthi Nigianni, and Fanny Söderbäck (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 89. ↩ 1.
“Networks of Dispossession” is a project dedicated to “mapping the relations of capital and power in Turkey.” “The dispossession network of rivers,” accessed via their website, connects private companies and shareholders to hydropower projects. See Mülksüzleştirme Ağlari, link, and link. ↩ 1.
Nurol Construction and Trading, “Ilısu Prof. Dr. Veysel Eroğlu Dam and HEPP,” Projects, link. ↩ 1.
Janine MacLeod, “Water and the Material Imagination: Reading the Sea of Memory Against the Flows of Capital,”