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This project aims to comparatively study promising grass-roots initiatives of people organizing around groundwater in places where pressures on the resource are particularly acute. Focusing on groundwater practices – of knowing, accessing and sharing – we combine qualitative ethnographic methods with hydrogeological and engineering insights to explore the knowledges, technologies and institutions that characterize these initiatives. The overall aim of the proposed project is to establish a network of excellence that joins researchers, activists, communities and policy makers in a shared quest to achieve more sustainable and equitable modes of groundwater governance.

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The T2GS website provides a space for co-learning, bringing geographically distant locations and scholars into conversation about different practices of knowing, accessing, sharing, and researching water. Through multimedia representations of the locations and topics studied, the website extends upon traditional notions of research. This website is a dynamic source, not a static collection of information. It offers an interactive way for people to engage with our understandings, processes, methodologies, concepts as they evolve through cross-site learning. Intentional composites of discussions on our research and the representations throughout the website act as a synthesis of the stories we highlight.

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• Although the scholars may be geographically separated from each other, initiatives such as cross-site visits and monthly online workshops on relevant themes keep us connected and offer spaces to bring a collection of knowledges into conversation.

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• Through the multimedia-based website, we emphasize non-traditional forms of learning and conducting research by channeling our experiences and trying to create new pathways of speaking, knowing, sharing, and caring for water as researchers, as practitioners, as activists. We utilize feminist perspectives in our efforts toward anti-colonialism. 

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• We highlight plurality and varying ways of understanding water to analyze how we approach, know, and study water. Bringing together these different perspectives allows for a better understanding of different coproductions of water and varying ways of understanding groundwater governance, among other topics.

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• This website emphasizes on-the-ground efforts beyond the academic theorization of concepts and into research connected within the field. Through this, we strengthen important partnerships with different institutions around the world.