Disorientations: The Political Ecology of "Displacing" Floating Communities from Cambodia's Tonle Sap Lake

In this article, we extend a theory of disorientations to reveal how attempts to fix and control both water and people are disrupting once-fluid relationships between the Tonle Sap Lake and communities who have lived with-on the lake for generations. Using ethnographic and participatory mapping methods, we examine the socio-ecological dynamics that preceded and succeeded in the forced relocation of three floating communities in 2018. We argue that communities' experiences challenge land-centric and event-centric understandings of displacement that pathologise fluid lifeways and fail to account for the materiality of water that has shaped floating villages' multi-generational relationships with their wetland ecology. We develop the concept of disorientations to illuminate villagers' experiences of relocation within a collapsing aquatic ecosystem-a collapse catalysed by state efforts to impose fixity on both hydrological flow and community mobility. The lens of disorientations invites displacement debates to consider materialities of place-whether pulsing water or living, shifting soils.