Book Talk by Andrea Muehlebach: "A Vital Frontier: Water Insurgencies in Europe"

Andrea Muehlebach (Professor of Anthropology, University of Bremen), speaks about her book, "A Vital Frontier: Water Insurgencies in Europe" (Duke UP, 2023), which examines the work of activists across Europe as they organize to preserve water as a commons and public good. Traversing social, political, legal, and hydrological terrains, Muehlebach situates water as a political fault line at the frontiers of financialization, showing how the seemingly relentless expansion of capital into public utilities is being challenged by an equally relentless and often successful insurgence of political organizing which exposes the commodification of water as the theft of life itself.