East of Terkos Lake, a dense network of streams once braided through the mud in perpetual motion. Today, more often than running water, one encounters pools—scattered, reflective, big and small—remnants of a once-continuous wetland system.2 When lignite was first unearthed here in 1910, few could have foreseen how extraction would re-script the landscape. The mines, both active and abandoned, now punctuate and define this terrain. As their pits deepened, they drew the groundwater further beneath the surface; the streams thinned and vanished, replaced by still, suspended bodies of water. Here in Istanbul’s peripheral wetlands, land is shaped at the confluence of milk and land markets. Water buffalo, long-time residents of the city, have been pushed to these margins by the steady advance of urban growth. Among post-industrial ruins, they find temporary refuge, crossing paths with migrant shepherds journeying toward the European border, who linger for a season to accompany them through the mud.

In one such village of Eyüpsultan, a disused pit fills with rainwater; a buffalo, seeking respite from the heat, lowers herself into its cool depths. As she wallows,3 the water muddies and deepens. Birds fly overhead and alight to pick at the insects she stirs up; frogs cling to her back to hitch a ride. This gathering draws in other species, and the still pool suddenly teems with life. New currents flow into the scene. Lignite yields to stone, to lime; the Black Sea coastline waxes and wanes with the dredging of sand until the shore becomes unrecognizable. As the alluvial richness drains away, in its place the city’s rubble is poured into growing mounds. Capital seeps over this soft and malleable ground, inflating the value of a plot a hundredfold in the span of a decade. A scatter of sand daffodils here, a cluster of endemic orchids there offer islands of interspecies resistance as pastoralist communities mobilize the state’s environmental protections amid surging land prices.4

To witness the wetlands of northern Istanbul is to perceive how these ecosystems are not fixed entities but fluid assemblages of water, soil, species, and human labor. The reading group has emerged out of the desire to read these shifting flows—whether hydrological, ecological, social, legal, or political. A growing body of critical theory is now responding to the irreparable damage caused to the world’s wetlands over the past century, as well as the loss of knowledge embodied within these fragile ecosystems. Whilst much of this material is born out of other contexts, “Wetlands as Pedagogical Spaces” is a collective attempt to bring some of these discussions into the context of Turkey and to evaluate commonalities and differences. We share this reading list here for those who wish to explore wetlands alongside us as a common ground of habitation and imagination.

We begin with Dilip da Cunha’s The Invention of Rivers,5 which reframes the colonial domination of India as born out of a domination of its waters, revealing how so-called natural water bodies are in fact cultural constructions. Ifor Duncan’s 2024 film and essay Soy el río Cauca y mis aguas podrían afectar tu salud [I am the river Cauca and my waters may be harmful to your health] extend this inquiry into ecological violence, tracing the voice of a river whose toxicity exposes the entanglements of extraction, health, and the rights of nature. From there, James C. Scott’s Against the Grain6 and Annie Proulx’s Fen, Bog & Swamp7 interrogate why wetlands have historically been sites of suspicion and control, showing how they resist sedentary state-building yet hold ecological depth. Against this background, Ameneh Solati’s essay Wetlands of Resistance8 highlights the threatened marshes of Iraq as refuges for nonconformist inhabitants and insurgent lifeways.

Philip Steinberg and Kimberley Peters’s Wet Ontologies9 and Rob Nixon’s Slow Violence10 are both attempts at rendering visible the fluid thinking and ecological timeframes that thinking about wetlands demand, while the short essays Spongiform11 by Andrea Ballestero and Seepage12 by Jason Cons explore different political and material forms that wetlands can take. Turning to the politics of drainage, Semih Çelik and Christina Luke’s Of Wetlands and Reclamation Regimes,13 a study on 19th-century Anatolia, situates wetlands within histories of capitalist reclamation, paired with the Marsh Bodies14 podcast, which attunes to the afterlives of both drainage and reclamation as embodied experience. Caterina Scaramelli’s How to Make a Wetland15 and the film Habitat 219016 by Hanna Rullmann and Faiza Ahmad Khan further examine conservation as contested practice, showing how wetlands become terrains of governance as well as resistance.

Sessions on disease and toxicity, with Andrea Bagnato’s Mapping Malaria in Italy,17 Chris Gratien’s The Ottoman Quagmire,18 Lodovica Guarnieri’s To Ingest the Submerged,19 and Max Liboiron’s Pollution Is Colonialism,20 bring attention to how wetlands are entangled with questions of public health and environmental injustice. Finally, Imani Jacqueline Brown’s Forest Islands of Our Ecological Diaspora21 and Sonia Levy’s Creatures of the Lines22 push toward feral ecologies and decolonial frames, asking us to confront terrestrial biases and imagine wetlands otherwise; as sites of multispecies justice, submerged epistemologies, and ecological repair.

To mark our collective submersions into this material over the past six months, what follows is the beginning of a collective glossary that introduces some of these questions around wetlands in a local context. Its form borrows from the reading group’s methodology of knowledge production through drawing relationships and reading between multiple texts and mediums. Footnotes therefore may make reference to original discussion materials or to another glossary entry, allowing the reader to explore the interrelated questions that have shaped this inquiry.

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Participants: Javid Aliyev, Eduardo Cruces, Kubilay Ercelep, Bardia Hafizi, Deniz Karakaş, Elif Koparal, Didem Ozan, İdil Salihoğlu, Eda Şarman, Mehmet Hakan Yamaner
Turkish Translations: Neylan Bağcıoğlu, Ezgi Yurteri