Holding structures and scapegoating theory … or something. A wobbly.

While working on the AquaCurious proposal, I had a wobbly. This happens, I pour myself into my work completely and so it gets tangled up with all the emotions and undercurrents and things. So I just poured it into Claude. I don’t know if any of its responses are factually true, but the feelings were BIG and the conversation helped.

Don’t you think this whole application is just naive? Too much of a pipe dream?

Continue reading “Holding structures and scapegoating theory … or something. A wobbly.”

Cape Town sewage flows

As part of thinking through the AquaSavvy tool visualisations, I revisited an idea from a loooong time ago (2018) that was part of the inspiration for AquaSavvy.

As an exercise, I’m not sure how this would make it into the AquaSavvy tool as is. I had to do a lot of wrangling with Claude, that I don’t think a layperson could or would want to do. It’s fine for the project to do this for our selected sites, but as a global tool meeting people where they are, I don’t know.

Continue reading “Cape Town sewage flows”

AquaCurious

I’m applying to the MSCA fellowship again, sucker for punishment. My current draftsummary as of 10 august is:

AquaCurious: Cultivating Curiosity-Driven, Gameful Coalition Culture for Sustained Civic-Led Water Partnerships.
I ask what capacities let civic and intermediary actors contribute to, rather than draw down, the care that sustains coalition-based water governance, and then work to design gameful approaches to nurture these capacities. AquaCurious bridges three fields: polycentric governance, gameful design, and feminist ethics of care, treating care-laden coordination labour as a design principle rather than a diversity problem to legitimise afterward. The design of a pocket park in Tampere serves as vehicle, anchoring the development of a design framework through iterative, workshop-tested engagement, using deep canvassing and behavioural coding of curiosity and cognitive labour. Gameful approaches that inspire the design include parkrun, already studied elsewhere as a coalition-governance actor and World of Warcraft guilds as holding structure. Outputs include a practitioner toolkit, ritual-template infrastructure recommendations, and a specific policy recommendation aimed at municipalities to pre-institutionalize mechanisms for intermediary and civic-actor participation. This proposal is aimed at converting my demonstrated but institutionally unrecognised leadership into sustainable, fundable independent practice.
Continue reading “AquaCurious”