The true course of human enlightenment has never run smoothly, and has often been characterised by factional rivalries that break out into open hostility. For example, there was the bitter rivalry that existed between the followers of the pre-eminent UCL statisticians Jerzy Neyman and Ronald Fisher, in which mutual enmity was such that neither camp could bring itself to share the faculty tearoom with the other. Neyman’s group would take their tea between 3.30 and 4.15pm and drink only India tea, whilst the Fisherites would turn up at 4.15pm and steadfastly stick to Chinese blend. It would appear that academic groupthink really is a thing.

However, such infighting pales into insignificance when viewed alongside the fisticuffs to be found whenever a hydro-sociologist comes into contact with a socio-hydrologist. And heaven forfend if you were to confuse one with the other — as if that were even remotely possible.

Just to underline how difficult it would be to confuse the two, Wikipedia offers a useful guide:

The first approach to socio-hydrology was the term “hydro-sociology”, which arises from a concern about the scale of impact of human activities on the hydrological cycle. Socio-hydrology is defined as the humans-water interaction and later as “the science of people and water”, which introduces bidirectional feedbacks between human–water systems, differentiating it from other related disciplines that deal with water.

So it seems that hydro-sociology came first but it was too limited in scope for some of its followers as it failed to deal with “bidirectional feedbacks between human–water systems”. And if you were wondering what such a feedback might look like, Wikipedia offers a highly educational graphic:

Delve further into this fascinating system diagram and you find that it covers so much more than the concepts of drinking and urination. For example, it is through the efforts of the socio-hydrologists that we have learnt that building levees can give a false sense of security from floods, and flood defences will often just transfer the problem downstream. Also, improving a water supply will only result in an increased demand, and that is surely a bad thing. None of this wisdom was available to the hydro-sociologists because they failed to appreciate the need for a right-pointing arrow. Or so Wikipedia would have you believe.

I think it’s only fair that I now present an account of hydro-sociology that wasn’t obviously written by a socio-hydrologist. According to Dr Asok Kumar Ghoshi of Jadavpur University:

HYDROSOCIOLOGY is that branch of science which deals with interaction of community activities, governance, religious actions, health & hazard risks initiated through pollution, flood & drought, international & national politics and basin economics with climate change, hydro-meteorological factors, hydro-geomorphic parameters and hydrogeological factors keeping in view overall growth plan of the country.

Gulp! So now I really am confused. You can’t deal with all of that without a plentiful supply of arrows. And with climate change added into the mix, you’ll probably need most of them to point to fossil fuels — unless, of course, you don’t care too much about where your next research grant is coming from. So maybe there isn’t such a difference between hydro-sociology and socio-hydrology after all.

Well, that’s not the view of Professors Alexander Ross and Heejun Chang of the Portland State University, although to be fair they do see there being a time when the two camps might be able to see eye-to-eye. In their interrogatorily titled paper, Socio-hydrology with hydrosocial theory: two sides of the same coin?, they suggest that there is a “sophisticated relationship with emergent syntheses”. They continue:

Our review concludes that socio-hydrology and hydrosocial research exist in a complex epistemological relationship, offering fertile grounds for lively discussions from which both will continue to benefit.

Lively discussions, indeed. In fact, as part of their conclusions they call for “the development of more holistic studies that might be seen as an overlapping set in a Venn Diagram”. Whether the overlap could lead to the sharing of the faculty tearoom remains to be seen. However, there is one potential area of epistemic cooperation that I might venture to suggest could be useful. How about if the hydro-sociologists and socio-hydrologists got their heads together to explain to the rest of the world that the recent Pakistani flooding, in which 9 per cent of the country was inundated (the equivalent of one third in climate science arithmetic), was so much greater than it need have been due to massive deforestation of the Himalayan foothills? That’s one huge arrow that doesn’t point to fossil fuels and it would be helpful to see the two camps settle their differences long enough to commission a suitable system diagram that even a school-shirking, erstwhile child activist with anti-Semitic proclivities could understand.

15 Comments

  1. People get paid – presumably by us taxpayers – to produce this claptrap?

    Unreal!

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  2. You missed a bit. According to one of your links:

    Hydrosocial theory emerged from a heterodox assemblage of Marxian understandings of capitalist accumulation and development in correspondence with multifarious theories of power and scale often described as “post-structuralist”

    I’ll stick to reading Supreme Court judgments, if you don’t mind, John.

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  3. John – a bit O/T from your post but kinda water related – Labour and the Liberal Democrats step up campaigns against sewage dumping – BBC News

    Partial quote – “Last week, BBC News produced analysis suggesting that in 2022 sewage may have been discharged nearly 6,000 times when it had not been raining.

    Water companies can release untreated sewage into rivers and seas when it rains to prevent it flooding homes, but such spills are illegal when it is dry.”

    I often wonder what other options the Water companies have with UK growing population & more sewage ?

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  4. The language of bafflement like ‘ Transgressing the Boundaries /Transformative Hermeneutics’

    of the Alan Sokal Hoax, suited to argument concerning how many angels can fit on the head

    of a pin… Hydro-sociology or socio-hydrology?

    Liked by 1 person

  5. Mark,

    Actually, I missed quite a lot. For example, there is this from the same paper:

    This world-making process extends through networks, understood in the post-modern sense as natural systems semiotically mediated by way of representational networks that produce denatured social assemblages often determined toward a reconstructed socio-ecological hybridity (Latour Citation2004).

    Other gems include ‘conduct the conduct’, the ‘dialectical development of waterscapes’, ‘water truths’ and so much more. It does rather read like a Sokal hoax.

    Liked by 1 person

  6. When I inherited this laptop, “Fredenstein”, the Chrome search engine was Ecosia. Through inertia, it still is. So I asked Ecosia, “What is the difference between hydro-sociology and social hydrology?”

    Its AI – powered by I know not what, answered thusly:

    Hydro-sociology and social hydrology are both fields that study the relationship between water and society, but they have different focuses.

    Hydro-sociology looks at the social aspects of water management, such as how water resources are utilized, accessed, and governed within societies. It considers the cultural, political, and economic factors that influence water usage and management practices.

    On the other hand, social hydrology is a branch of hydrology that examines the impact of human activities on the water cycle. It studies how human actions, such as land use changes, urbanization, and pollution, affect the quantity and quality of water resources.

    If you are interested in learning more about the intersection of water and society from an environmental perspective, you may want to explore the topic further by selecting ‘Green answers’ for eco-friendly perspectives on water management and conservation.

    The reason I was inspired to ask the artificial expert was because rather a lot of the excerpts above sniff of silicon.

    Liked by 1 person

  7. Do I really care? Not much to be told, but if this schism had occurred when I taught my bit of hydrogeology at UEA it might have added a certain frisson. Who’d have thought that simple arrows added to a simple diagram would have made it so controversial. I have also always preferred Indian tea.

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  9. Alan,

    In an important sense you are quite right to be indifferent. Hydro-sociology or socio-hydrology? It doesn’t really matter since they are both chewy, crunchy and delicious.

    Nevertheless, I’d like to think that I’m making an important observation about certain aspects of academia. Despite the opaque nonsense that seems to constitute much that is written within the two approaches, hydrologists appear to have created a dichotomy within their ranks which seems to be preciously defended in a way that owes a lot to the development of academic sub-societies and little to do with any meaningful distinctions. Yes, such distinctions are offered, and AI can pick up on them, but they are not convincing in my mind. They seem like rationalisations after the fact. In-groups and out-groups are just as much a phenomenon within scientific disciplines as they are in broader life.

    And for the record, I drink coffee.

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  11. I would be vaguely interested to learn if bona fide hydrogeologists were responsible for this dichotomy of approach. I somehow doubt it. I suggest it might have been sociologists, looking for new fields to plough , who would have been responsible. The Environmental Sciences Department at UEA might have been a likely initiation point (but as far as I know it wasn’t) having both hydrogeologists (2 with hangers on like me) and those delving into the mystical arts of sociology (also 2) and everyone teaching in the multidisciplinary school encouraged to mix in their research. It is not the multidisciplinary approach that is odd (or even funny) but the fact that, according to some, the combination has fissioned into two different approaches. Could this be a response to whomever leads the grouping – a hydrogeologist or a social “scientist”?

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  13. Alan,

    Any vague interest that you or I might have in the origins of the split might justify taking a quick look at the Ross/Chang paper cited in my article, since it has a section titled ‘Origins of socio-hydrology’. I am sensing, however, that your level of interest is just not strong enough for you to justify such an effort, and so I will summarise what they say for you:

    They think it all started with a paper written by Sivapalan et al in 2012, with research that was situated under the topic of Integrated Water Resources Management (IWRM). The claim is that socio-hydrology introduced the concepts of ‘coevolution and complexity’ to IWRM, and that is what makes it so new and exciting.

    I remain profoundly unmoved.

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  15. Alan,

    I know that you have been around too much to be prepared to waste your time on nonsense 🙂

    Liked by 1 person

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