Respecting local knowledge keepers through cellphilms featuring local water bodies: towards decolonizing water management

Abstract

Abstract This paper outlines arts-based methods aimed at exploring how storytelling with local knowledge keepers (KKs) through cellphilms featuring local waterways might contribute to decolonizing water management by uncovering different values of and relationships with water. We define ‘knowledge keepers’ as people who have an existing relationship with a particular water body and whose knowledge and expertise with respect to the water body emerge from lived experience and not academic scholarship or technical training. We provide insights into and analyse a graduate curriculum enacted in South Africa, where students, through encounters with local KKs and water bodies, made cellphilms presenting their own water narratives and screened these for the public. Cellphilms, as participatory visual methods in research and teaching, are used to explore learning experiences for students and KKs, and the resulting cellphilms become places of knowledge transfer. We outline our theoretical and methodological approaches as they relate to our goals of decolonizing expertise in higher education learning and addressing multiple types of water-related values.