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Articles 1 - 14 of 14
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
Infrastructure's (Supra)Sacralizing Effects: Contesting Littoral Spaces Of Fishing, Faith, And Futurity Along Sri Lanka's Western Coastline, Orlando Woods
Research Collection School of Social Sciences
This paper explores the ways in which infrastructural development can cause the sacred to become a source of political legitimacy, and sacred authority to become a politically charged construct. For resource-dependent communities, the ecological damage caused by infrastructural development can cause ostensibly profane issues to be imbued with sacred meaning and value. With sacralization comes the expectation that figures of sacred authority will campaign for justice on behalf of the communities that they represent. However, when the authority evoked comes from outside the boundaries of institutionalized religion, processes of suprasacralization come into play. By exploring infrastructure’s (supra)sacralizing effects, I demonstrate …
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 …
Fertility And Rural Electrification In Bangladesh, Tomoki Fujii, Abu S. Shonchoy
Fertility And Rural Electrification In Bangladesh, Tomoki Fujii, Abu S. Shonchoy
Research Collection School Of Economics
We use contemporaneous and retrospective panel datasets to examine the household-level relationship between fertility and access to electricity in Bangladesh. We find that access to electricity reduces fertility by about 0.2 children over a period of five years or total fertility rate by about 1.2 in most estimates. This finding is robust with respect to the choice of the estimation method, the choice of sample, and potential presence of endogeneity. The finding also corroborates the theoretical predictions on time use and consumption pattern derived from our model of electrification and fertility. The results also suggest that television is an important …
Contesting Access To Power In Urban Pakistan, Ijlal Naqvi
Contesting Access To Power In Urban Pakistan, Ijlal Naqvi
Research Collection School of Social Sciences
Studies of informal housing and urban citizenship in South Asia frequently link the precariousness of squatter life with the struggle to formalize engagement with the state. However, this article argues that the transition to a more formal mode of making claims on the state is a shift in terrain that is no less negotiated and contested. Through an ethnography of access to electrical power in Islamabad, Pakistan, this article explores the pervasiveness of informality in access to service delivery for a squatter settlement and its bourgeois neighbors. The politics of access to urban infrastructure reveal a state of pervasive predation …
Fertility And Rural Electrification In Bangladesh, Tomoki Fujii, Abu S. Shonchoy
Fertility And Rural Electrification In Bangladesh, Tomoki Fujii, Abu S. Shonchoy
Research Collection School Of Economics
We use a household-level panel dataset from Bangladesh to examine the household-level relationship between fertility and the access to electricity. We find that the household's access to electricity reduces the change in the number of children by about 0.1 to 0.25 children in a period of five years in most estimates. This finding also applies to retrospective panel data and is robust to the choice of covariates and estimation methods. Our finding passes falsification test and corroborates with the predictions of our theoretical model on the households' time use and consumption pattern.
Poverty Decomposition By Regression: An Application To Tanzania, Tomoki Fujii
Poverty Decomposition By Regression: An Application To Tanzania, Tomoki Fujii
Research Collection School Of Economics
We develop a poverty decomposition method that is based on a consumption regression model. Because this method uses an integral of the partial derivatives of a poverty measure with respect to time, the resulting poverty decomposition satisfies time-reversion consistency and sub-period additivity. Unlike the existing poverty decomposition methods, it allows us to ascribe the observed change in poverty to various covariates of interest collected at a disaggregate level. This method is applied to two datasets from Tanzania to assess, among others, the short- and long-term impacts of infrastructure and market access on poverty.
Fertility And Rural Electrification In Bangladesh, Tomoki Fujii, Abu S. Shonchoy
Fertility And Rural Electrification In Bangladesh, Tomoki Fujii, Abu S. Shonchoy
Research Collection School Of Economics
We use a panel dataset from Bangladesh to examine the relationship between fertility and the adoption of electricity with the latter instrumented by infrastructure development and the quality of service delivery. We find that the adoption of electricity reduces fertility, and this impact is more pronounced when the household already has two or more children. This observation can be explained by a simple household model of time use, in which adoption of electricity affects only the optimal number of children but not necessarily current fertility behavior if the optimal number has not yet been reached.
Infrastructure Provision, Gender And Poverty In Indian Slums, Prithi Parikh, Kun Fu, Himanshu Parikh, Allan Mcrobie, Gerard George
Infrastructure Provision, Gender And Poverty In Indian Slums, Prithi Parikh, Kun Fu, Himanshu Parikh, Allan Mcrobie, Gerard George
Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business
We examine the relationship between infrastructure provision and poverty alleviation by analyzing 500 interviews conducted in serviced and non-serviced slums in India. Using a mixed-method approach of qualitative analysis and regression modeling, we find that infrastructure was associated with a 66% increase in education among females. Service provision increased literacy by 62%, enhanced income by 36%, and reduced health costs by 26%. Evidence suggests that a gender-sensitive consideration of infrastructure is necessary and that a ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach will not suffice. We provide evidence that infrastructure investment is critical for well-being of slum dwellers and women in particular.