The Word for World Is Water. World-Building and Creative Resistance Through Liquid Alliances

by Katya Garcia-Anton (Editor), Margarida Mendes (Editor), Sara Ahmed (Contributor)

Inspired by The Word for World Is Forest by Ursula K. Le Guin, this book understands water as a cosmological force that shapes worlds, resists them, and sustains them. It brings together artists, thinkers, and activists from around the globe to explore fluid bodies—rivers that carry resistance, oceans that shelter communities, peatlands that preserve memory. From Indigenous, ecological, and decolonial perspectives, the contributors evoke water as archive, kinship, and living territory—a medium of transformation, resistance, and survival. The result is a polyphonic atlas of fluid world-making for our planetary time.

Susan Schuppli (Canada / UK) is an artist and researcher working on climate, water, and the material politics of evidence. Karolin Tampere (Estonia / Norway) is a curator and researcher who explores peatlands as living, resistant, and absorptive ecosystems. Ailton Krenak (Amazonia / Brazil) is an Indigenous leader, philosopher, and activist who understands the Amazon as a sentient, interconnected world. Sara Ahmed (India / UK) is a scholar, feminist theorist, and founder of the Living Waters Museum. Hylozoic / Desires (India / UK) is an artist duo; Himali Singh Soin and David Soin Tappeser create poetic works engaging with mythic ecosystems and entangled temporalities. Nat Raha (UK) is a poet and scholar whose work bridges trans poetics, radical politics, and relations of kinship between worlds. Karan Shrestha (Nepal) is an Indigenous artist from the Himalayas whose practice engages with memory, landscape, and spiritual ecology.

160 pages, Paperback

Published August 11, 2026

Reviews

[Mochi]

water teaches us that nothing stands alone. to follow a river, a bog, a glacier, or an estuary is to move through words that precede us and worlds that will outlast us.

a powerful, tender love letter that is both vast and deep in time, space, experience.
in each essay it is apparent that the authors are drawing from so much life lived, their own and the generations before them. the writing is beautiful and fluid and rejuvenating :P

sara ahmed is brilliant as always (some of my favorite passages: on the tensions of "dirtiness" vs holiness of the same water; on not essentializing environmental care as womens work) and each essay feels very cohesive with each other, i also really enjoyed sharak's poetry+art and ailton krenak's piece!

[Bassinho]

Canta xente interesante falando de algo que lle chola. Aproximacións diversas pero todas baixo o mesmo. Un 10