Professor Nicole Vitellone, based in Sociology, Social Policy and Criminology at the University of Liverpool, has recently published her new book 'Problematising Water: An Experiment on the Edges of Interdisciplinarity'.
Placing water at the centre of an interdisciplinary investigation, Professor Vitellone offers new ways thinking about how we study, understand, and intervene in environmental challenges.
Problematising Water: An Experiment on the Edges of Interdisciplinarity offers a distinctive methodological and conceptual contribution to contemporary environmental research. Drawing on human geography, sociology, anthropology, science and technology studies, and ethnomethodology Nicole Vitellone develops an innovative approach to thinking with water; one that unsettles assumptions about how environmental knowledge is produced.
At the heart of the book is Vitellone’s engagement with Michel Foucault’s concept of problematisation, which she uses to interrogate how water, particularly the water refill fountain, becomes an object of concern, intervention, and collaboration. Through an in‑depth study of London’s #OneLess refill water fountain pilot, an initiative designed to reduce reliance on single‑use plastic bottles, she examines the refill fountain as a problematic space: a site where varied actors – marine scientists, conservation practitioners, systems change specialists, and the public – come together in the action of the refill.
By foregrounding the refill fountain as a methodological experiment, the book demonstrates how problematisation can create new pathways for interdisciplinary work and exposes tensions in environmental research practices, particularly around the methods, objects, and types of expertise that shape responses to the climate crisis.
Problematising Water contributes to wider debates on environmental governance, sustainability, and the politics of everyday infrastructures, offering a framework for re‑evaluating the role of research in addressing urgent ecological challenges.
Published by Routledge, the book will be of particular interest to those working in environmental sociology, science and technology studies, human geography, and interdisciplinary environmental research. With reviewer Professor Mike Michael from the University of Exeter praising the book for its “sophisticated exploration of the ways in which water is variously enacted by publics and professionals” and the “innovative, insightful and evocative picture” Vitellone draws of “how an environmental politics can manifest in its specificity."
Problematising Water: An Experiment on the Edges of Interdisciplinarity is published by Routledge in their ‘Routledge Explorations in Environmental Studies’ series and can be purchased here.