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Lookup NU author(s): Dr Helen UnderhillORCiD, Dr Cat ButtonORCiD
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0).
The exhibition ‘Confluences: Water and People’ drew together creative, participatory, community-focused research by partners in Colombia, Ethiopia, India, Malaysia, and the UK, as well as artists whose work connects with the River Tyne, its tributaries, people, and landscapes. This paper addresses this exhibition as a piece of research in its own right, aiming to answer two core research questions: (1) How do people connect with water? and (2) How can we develop new insights into the intangible values of water through exploring these relationships at both local (the specific) and global (the universal) scales? We explore the challenges of interdisciplinary work in relation to our curatorial-research process. The paper does not present or discuss the exhibition itself (we encourage readers to explore the online exhibition at: https://www.ncl.ac.uk/apl/events/water-and-people/), but rather the curatorial process that underpinned it, and what it meant as a piece of research. In doing so, we offer learnings for the development of curation-as-method within interdisciplinary research projects, particularly those with a physical sciences focus such as water security.
Author(s): Underhill H, Button C
Publication type: Article
Publication status: Published
Journal: Area
Year: 2025
Pages: Epub ahead of print
Online publication date: 14/09/2025
Acceptance date: 22/08/2025
Date deposited: 17/10/2025
ISSN (electronic): 1475-4762
Publisher: Wiley
URL: https://doi.org/10.1111/area.70056
DOI: 10.1111/area.70056
Data Access Statement: Data sharing not applicable to this article as no datasets were generated or analysed during the current study.
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