Emancipating nature: What the Flood Apprentice Learned from a Modelling Tutorial

The issue of riverine flooding in the UK is closely tied up with computer simulations. Arguably, these modelling practices are ripe with the anticipation of nature. They aspire to pre-empt it, hence expect it to be ‘out there’, and ultimately work through formalized distillations of it – hydrodynamic equations – which have their own anticipations and place their own demands on their modellers. Through the experience of a flood modelling apprenticeship I argue that the taking-place of such anticipations paradoxically relies on the birth of a hybrid, the model-modeller, and thus on a nature which is generative rather than anticipative and wholly freed from ontological confines.