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Articles 1 - 3 of 3
Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences
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 …