River Landscapes in the Anthropocene: A Multicultural and Multispecies History
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Blockseminar FS 2025 , Instructor Prof. Debjani Bhattacharyya University of Zürich
Supported by UZH’s ULF Teaching Micro Innovation Fund 2024
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Landscape architects Anuradha Mathur and Dilip da Cuhna are beginning to analyze rivers not simply as natural phenomena, but rather "open fields of wetness." Taking that provocation as the starting point, this course at the University of Zurich delved into two broad questions: 1) Can the histories of rivers help us understand how human design acted upon and transformed rivers and watersheds? 2) How can the attention to materiality of the river help us transform our understandings of our environment and offer new methods of doing environmental history? Rivers are living beings, beings that move, change course, give life, and also die.
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Control of rivers for navigation, energy, potable water and symbolic value has animated global politics and local power for millennia. States have attempted to control rivers through canals, dams, and docks. In the process, these projects have transformed waterbodies, drained swamps, and cleared wetlands--all of which has sought to render inert these open fields of wetness.
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Rivers or waterbodies have responded by shifting course, flooding, soaking and devouring landmasses. Through this course created for river Landscapes, students investigate the historical play of fluvial forces and human desire for control over those forces. The course began with exemplary studies of rivers that are conceptually provocative, historically deep and good to think with. Students explored the relation between natural systems and the human desire for control and the history and afterlives of these techniques of control. The readings and assignments in the course were designed to make one think about the many ways humans, animals and non-human forces interacted with rivers, swamps and waterbodies.​
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River Landscapes in the Anthropocene: A Multicultural and Multispecies History was a block seminar led by Debjani Bhattacharyya at the University of Zürich in the fall semester of 2025. The seminar approached rivers as historical, ecological, and cultural agents, exploring how multispecies interactions, infrastructures of control, and environmental transformations shape river landscapes in the Anthropocene. Through coursework, field research, and independent study, four students developed glossary entries as research contributions to the project River Landscapes: A New Glossary.
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As part of the seminar, a three-day field trip was organized in collaboration with WE ARE AIA as part of the Synergies Project River Landscapes: A New Glossary. The excursion took place along the riverbanks of the Rhine in and around Bregenz, Austria, and served as a methodological extension of the seminar. A series of site-based workshops introduced different modes of inquiry, including embodied mapping, collective listening, oral history, and speculative writing.
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Together, these methods invited participants to engage the river not only as an object of study but as a dynamic field of relations involving human and more-than-human actors. By combining sensory observation, narrative practices, and collective reflection, the workshops generated situated forms of knowledge that informed the glossary entries presented below.
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The Body and the Site
Workshop led by Mira Hirtz
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The Body and the Site: scores for being with(in) by Mira Hirtz is a method gathering that explores how we sense, map, and inhabit landscapes through embodied practice. Moving from observation to immersion, the workshop offers open scores combining movement, perception, and drawing.
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Students begin by attuning to their bodies and surroundings, exploring the kinesphere and the skin as a sensing interface. Through a shared gazing exercise, the landscape is approached as a stage populated by visible and imagined actors. These impressions are translated into evolving maps.
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In guided partner work, students navigate with closed eyes, deepening trust and sensory awareness, before moving into independent exploration. Encounters with specific sites or materials invite reflection on reciprocity between body and environment. The workshop concludes with layered map-making and collective discussion, opening the possibility of these mappings as entries in a shared glossary.
Oral History and Speculative Writing
Workshop led by Martina Huber
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Oral History and Speculative Writing by Martina Huber explores how river narratives can emerge through collective storytelling and embodied writing. Approaching the river not as a backdrop but as a collaborator, the workshop invites students to listen, remember, and imagine with water.
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Drawing from local myths, personal memory, and shared observation, participants begin by attuning to the presence and movement of the river. Through a method we call river writing, attention is given to flow, erosion, and entanglement, tracing how the river moves through stories and how stories move through us. Writing unfolds through individual reflection and collective exchange, allowing fragments of memory, speculation, and place-based experience to surface. Moments of listening and storytelling open space for oral histories and imagined futures, where water becomes both witness and co-author. These narratives gradually take shape as site-specific texts that reflect the presence, agency, and temporalities of the river.
The workshop concludes with a collective sharing of texts and reflections, opening the possibility for these writings to become entries within River Landscapes: A New Glossary, a growing constellation of stories, practices, and relationships shaped by life with rivers.
We Are Bodies of Water
Soundwalk by Ishita Chakraborty
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We Are the Bodies of Water is a 17-minute sound exploration by Swiss- Indian artist Ishita Chakraborty, resulting from her travelogue of the Indian Sundarbans, the largest delta and mangrove ecosystem in the world. This Soundwalk illuminates us through field recordings, readings, organic sounds, and poetry. It creates the opportunity to imagine multispecies relationships between climate change, migration, and eco-feminism. The artist grew up near cities like Kolkata in the foothills of the Himalayas and is a resident of Switzerland. In this sound walk, she is connecting the dots between melting glaciers not only in the Alps but also their effects on rising sea levels and tidal erosion, which is swallowing up the Sundarbans. The artist brings eastern deltaic forest Sundarbans tidal discourses to this collective listening session - an ecosystem under tremendous stress from sea-level rise. She tries to create a bridge and a chorus between the global South and global North for our future understanding of cohabitation. The Soundwalk guided us to walk collectively, reflecting on the ecology of care as an act of resistance.
Contributors:
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Participants: Remo Bosshard, Winona Kemper, Martina Veronesi, Max Huber
Institution: UZH Zürich
Professor: Debjani Bhattacharyya
Facilitators: Eliot Gisel, Martina Huber Marthaler, Mira Hirtz, Ishita Chakraborty
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Debjani Bhattacharyya holds the Chair for the History of the Anthropocene at the University of Zürich. Previously, she was an Associate Professor of History and Urban Studies at Drexel University. Her work lies at the intersection of legal and environmental history. Her research is driven by the desire to understand how legal and economic structures order our conceptualization of environmental transformations and shape how we respond to climate crises. Her book, Empire and Ecology in the Bengal Delta: The Making of Calcutta (Cambridge University Press, 2018) won the 2019 honorable mention for the best book in Urban History. Her work has been published in the Journal of Social and Economic History of the Orient, Comparative Studies in South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, Economic and Political Weekly, Global Environment, and Modern Asian Studies. She is the South Asia editor for History Compass. Her writings have also appeared in The Telegraph, Amrita Bajar Patrika, n+1, The Diplomat, and Somatosphere.