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Articles 1 - 7 of 7
Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences
Wild Hogs In The Water: Contested Infrastructural Ecologies Of Reservoir Storage In Texas, Sayd Randle
Wild Hogs In The Water: Contested Infrastructural Ecologies Of Reservoir Storage In Texas, Sayd Randle
Research Collection College of Integrative Studies
Reservoirs are developed to store water in reserve for future use. But once built, reservoir sites inevitably hold more than just water, often serving as a key habitat for a range of species. This paper examines how one such animal has transformed water storage facilities and nearby landscapes into contested ground in urbanising areas of Texas, USA. Living around the reservoirs, feral hogs complicate the process of urbanisation by degrading the stockpiled water and infrastructure at the storage sites themselves and by damaging private property throughout the surrounding landscape. Tracking local efforts to manage the hogs, the case study illustrates …
Disrupting The Grid: Encountering Fire And Smoke Through Energy Infrastuctures, Deepti Chatti, Sayd Randle
Disrupting The Grid: Encountering Fire And Smoke Through Energy Infrastuctures, Deepti Chatti, Sayd Randle
Research Collection College of Integrative Studies
Experiences of fires are mediated by energy infrastructures and refracted through social inequality and difference. In California, a state marked by increasingly intense and frequent wildfires, the grid is a source of fire risk, with historically marginalized groups bearing the brunt of exposures to wildfire smoke. Drawing on research conducted by one of the co-authors in collaboration with California’s Karuk Tribe and Blue Lake Rancheria Tribes, this empirically grounded review article expands our understanding of grids. Extant scholarship presents the grid as a networked infrastructure mediating access to energy and one’s relationship to a collective and the state. We extend …
Hawker Culture And Its Infrastructure: Experiences And Contestations In Everyday Life, Lily Kong, Aidan Marc Wong
Hawker Culture And Its Infrastructure: Experiences And Contestations In Everyday Life, Lily Kong, Aidan Marc Wong
Research Collection College of Integrative Studies
Hawker foods characterize urban Asia, with similarities and differences across cities that forge both cultural commonalities and distinctions. From the itinerant to the fixed location, from the temporary sites to the purposebuilt, hawker foods are served in informal settings, with varying degrees of tradition and innovation, hygiene and squalidness, local authenticity and globalized influence. In the side-streets of Beijing where local delicacies such as scorpion are served, to the abundant food cart vendors on Bangkok streets, to the warung (small, typically family-owned eateries) in Surabaya, and the carefully planned and designed hawker centres in Singapore, hawker culture is a distinctive
Ecosystem Duties, Green Infrastructure, And Environmental Injustice In Los Angeles, Sayd Randle
Ecosystem Duties, Green Infrastructure, And Environmental Injustice In Los Angeles, Sayd Randle
Research Collection College of Integrative Studies
In Los Angeles, water managers and environmentalist NGOs champion green infrastructure retrofits, installations intended to maximize the water-absorbing capacity of the urban landscape. In such arrangements, the work of water management is necessarily spread among a more-than-human community, including (but certainly not limited to) humans, plants, soils, and gravels. This article analyzes the human labor within these collaborations, tracking when and how this work gets enrolled in networks of water management and circuits of value. I develop the term ecosystem duties to characterize these exertions and as a useful analytic for assessing emergent dynamics of environmental justice.
Battling Over Bathwater: Greywater Technopolitics In Los Angeles, Sayd Randle
Battling Over Bathwater: Greywater Technopolitics In Los Angeles, Sayd Randle
Research Collection College of Integrative Studies
In Los Angeles, domestic wastewater recycling ("greywater") systems are controversial, loved by local environmentalists and disdained by the city's water agencies. Drawing on fieldwork among greywater advocates and public water agency workers, this article examines how greywater systems function as nodes that unsettle relations between residents and the public agencies that manage the city's water grid. Elaborating the longstanding frictions over greywater reuse in LA reveals how these fixtures are mobilized by advocates to rescript the roles of both individuals and the state within the urban waterscape. Detailing public agency workers' resistance to this form of selective disconnection from the …
On Aqueducts And Anxiety: Water Infrastructure, Ruination, And A Region-Scaled Anthropocene Imaginary, Sayd Randle
On Aqueducts And Anxiety: Water Infrastructure, Ruination, And A Region-Scaled Anthropocene Imaginary, Sayd Randle
Research Collection College of Integrative Studies
This paper explores popular expectations for and meanings of the U.S. West's environmental future, as articulated through recent artistic representations of the Los Angeles's expansive water provision network. Weaving together material from participant observation and readings of creative works, I show how infrastructural imagery is used to index anxieties about a future of water scarcity. Presenting familiar, currently functional water infrastructures as ruins-in-the-making, these artists use the physical stuff of water provision networks to advance critiques of longstanding modes of development and the material basis of urban-rural relations in the U.S. West. Doing so, these imagined ruins draw the global-scale …
Missing Power: Nostalgia And Disillusionment Among Southern California Water Engineers, Sayd Randle
Missing Power: Nostalgia And Disillusionment Among Southern California Water Engineers, Sayd Randle
Research Collection College of Integrative Studies
California's sprawling network of aqueducts and dams is often cited as the embodiment of a high-modernist approach to resource management. But while once widely celebrated, in recent decades this infrastructural system and the institutions that manage it have been the subject of growing criticism and shrinking funding streams. Based on ethnographic research among employees at several California water agencies, this article explores the sense of nostalgia and diminished power experienced by the workers tasked with overseeing these networks. These emic perspectives are frequently articulated in the form of unfavorable comparisons to an imagined past, when the workers believe that their …