Freedom of information requests are an important research tool yet receive comparably little meth... more Freedom of information requests are an important research tool yet receive comparably little methodological scrutiny relative to other methods commonly used by geographers. This article considers two methodological aspects to freedom of information requests. The first is how they operate as "live archives" that take shape as batches of files are compiled in ways that reflect search terms, negotiations over the scope of requests, bureaucratic processes, and considered judgments of researchers in response to variables both within and beyond their control. The second considers how freedom of information requests operate as a political methodology through the encounter they produce with state bureaucracies. Using examples that cut across these concerns and illuminate some of the ways that methodological scrutiny matters, the article discusses how freedom of information requests present overlapping yet distinct concerns for qualitative research on issues of reflexivity, ethics, and positionality. The methodological concerns that arise are not frequently discussed but, as with other methods, are important to understanding the limits and reach of data collection, analysis, and accessibility both for researchers and for the communities who may have interest in, or be impacted by, geographic research.
This paper develops the concept of multispecies thought through a study of dog-walking in a publi... more This paper develops the concept of multispecies thought through a study of dog-walking in a public park in Lancaster, England. It draws on cybernetic ideas from Bateson, Peircean semiotics and von Uexküll's umwelten to explore how multispecies worlds come into being in the spaces of the park, and amongst humans, dogs, leads, toys and other things. It focuses on how an understanding of multispecies thought can be discerned that is not only specific to the situated relations in dogwalks, but also constituted through routines that foster new capacities between specific bodies. In this way, we come to understand multispecies worlds as located at the sites where specific, associated worlds are co-produced by dogs and humans yet reducible to neither. We use the examples of lead-walking and play with balls and frisbees to show how semiotic relations are co-produced across species. Building on previous work, we confront species-defined notions of capacity and thought and look instead at how the indexical relations of multispecies thinking offers liberatory potential.
This article uses water to examine how the relationships of ethics to science are modified throug... more This article uses water to examine how the relationships of ethics to science are modified through the pursuit of Earth stewardship. Earth stewardship is often defined as the use of science to actively shape social-ecological relations by enhancing resilience. The changing relations of science to values are explored by considering how ideas of resilience operate to translate different ways of knowing water into the framework of Earth stewardship. This is not a neutral process, and Earth stewardship requires careful appraisal to ensure other ways of knowing water are not oppressed. Technical summary. Scientific disclosures of anthropogenic impacts on the Earth systemthe Anthropoceneincreasingly come with ethical diagnoses for value transformation and, often, Earth stewardship. This article examines the changing relationship of science to values in calls for Earth stewardship with special attention to water resilience. The article begins by situating recent efforts to reconceptualize human-water relations in view of anthropogenic impacts on the global water system. It then traces some of the ways that Earth stewardship has been articulated, especially as a framework supporting the use of science to actively shape social-ecological relations by enhancing resilience. The shift in relations of ethics and science entailed by Earth stewardship is placed in historical context before the issues of water resilience are examined. Resilience, and critiques of it, are then discussed for how they operate to translate different ways of knowing water into the framework of Earth stewardship. The ethical stakes of such translations are a core concern of the conclusion. Rather than reducing different ways of knowing water to those amendable to the framework of Earth stewardship, the article advances a pluralized approach as needed to respect multiple practices for knowing and relating to waterand resilience. Social media summary. Water resilience is key to Earth stewardship; Jeremy Schmidt examines how it changes relations of science and ethics.
The field of water ethics focuses on the judgments affecting water use and decision making, as we... more The field of water ethics focuses on the judgments affecting water use and decision making, as well as their normative justification. These justifications can take many forms. Consequently, water ethics grapple with philosophical considerations, law, custom, religion, and the practical options available for accessing or distributing water in different contexts. Increasingly, the field also includes active academic support for communities seeking water justice. This review examines these dynamics in three steps. The first section provides a brief history of water ethics as a distinct field of inquiry. It highlights how philosophical approaches to water ethics have been in tension with the use of water ethics to support integrated water resources management. The second section reviews scholarship from multiple disciplines that overlap in their concern regarding ethical relations to water and different ways social norms are justified. This scholarship has pushed the field of water ethics to reflect more critically on what constitutes justification given the diversity and plurality of water norms. The third section examines how the obligations entailed by water ethics are acted upon by scholarly and community initiatives seeking water justice. Here, the article focuses on how the recognition of multiple vectors of inequality has led to a shift towards intersectional ethics. A short conclusion offers no prescriptions but rather encouragement for continued appreciation of how this subfield helps reframe and address urgent water concerns.
This Forum article reports on a meta-review of more than 19,000 published works on water security... more This Forum article reports on a meta-review of more than 19,000 published works on water security, of which less than 1 percent explicitly focus on race or ethnicity. This is deeply concerning, because it indicates that race and ethnicity-crucial factors that affect the provision of safe, reliable water-continue to be ignored in academic and policy literatures. In response to this finding the Forum calls for building intersectional water security frameworks that recognize how empirical drivers of social and environmental inequality vary both within and across groups. Intersectional frameworks of water security can retain policy focus on the key material concerns regarding access, safety, and the distribution of water-related risks. They can also explicitly incorporate issues of race and ethnicity alongside other vectors of inequality to address key, overlooked concerns of water security. Water security scholarship almost uniformly excludes an explicit treatment of race or ethnicity. This is a critical issue, because without an adequate account of water security's relationships to race and ethnicity, crucial factors affecting the provision of safe, reliable water will continue to go unaddressed. In response to this exclusion, we call for intersectional analyses of water security as an anti-oppressive approach that can orient academic and policy analysis to multiple dimensions of inequality and insecurity, including ones dependent on ethnic and racial discrimination. This Forum article proceeds in two steps. First, it highlights the limited attention given to race and ethnicity within water security scholarship. It does so by reporting and discussing the findings from a meta-review of water security scholarship, where less than 1 percent of that scholarship explicitly references
This report on geography and ethics focusses on the justification of normative evaluations. Justi... more This report on geography and ethics focusses on the justification of normative evaluations. Justifying why actions are right or wrong often relies on appeals to high-order principles, such as the common good. But this is not always the case, as this report shows by identifying an ethics of anti-oppression that relies instead on struggles against individual and social harms and the conditions that generate them. Through resistance, ethics of anti-oppression also shift the terms of normative justification across a range of considerations within geography and beyond it, from refugees and asylum seekers to food production and blockades against extractive infrastructure.
This report on geography and ethics focuses on the conditions of ethics. It identifies the ethica... more This report on geography and ethics focuses on the conditions of ethics. It identifies the ethical stakes of how accounts of unequal anthropogenic impacts on the Earth are specified with respect to both injustice and to what are deemed viable futures. It centres arguments of Indigenous and Black scholars regarding kinship and intersectionality, and respective ethical practices of struggle, resurgence and rebellion against the mutual oppression of peoples of colour and the environment. I identify challenges these forms of grounded practices pose to more-than-human geographies and urge an approach to understanding ethical conditions as concrete concerns.
Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 2022
Since 2009, the United Nations programme on Harmony with Nature has sought a new philosophy of gl... more Since 2009, the United Nations programme on Harmony with Nature has sought a new philosophy of global environmental governance known as Earth jurisprudence. This paper examines how Harmony with Nature has advanced Earth jurisprudence to unite Indigenous legal traditions, rights of nature, and mounting
Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space, 2022
In Canada, Indigenous activists and scholars critique municipalization as a threefold process tha... more In Canada, Indigenous activists and scholars critique municipalization as a threefold process that subverts Indigenous authority to the state, then delegates forms of state authority to Indigenous peoples, and concludes by asserting that delegated authority satisfies the terms of Indigenous selfdetermination. This article centers municipalization in two steps that connect it to how Canada divides power regarding foreign and domestic affairs. The first examines the history of municipalization and its evolution alongside changes in Canadian federalism. The second examines dispossession by municipalization to show how state divisions of power facilitate extraction of value from land. It uses a case where the federal government considered creating new, privatized reserves of Indigenous land explicitly to facilitate oil pipelines. Together, these support an argument that municipalization is not only a powerful language of critique, but critical to understanding the ongoing production of settler colonial space.
In 2019 several funerals were held for glaciers. If enough glaciers die, could they go extinct? I... more In 2019 several funerals were held for glaciers. If enough glaciers die, could they go extinct? Is there geologic extinction? Yes. This article develops three arguments to support this claim. The first revisits Georges Cuvier's original argument for extinction and its reliance on geology, especially glaciers. Retracing connections to glaciers and the narrowing of extinction to biological species in the nineteenth century, the author argues that anthropogenic forcing on how the Earth system functions-the Anthropocene-warrants rethinking extinction geologically. The second argument examines the specificity of ice loss and multiple practices responding to this loss: from art exhibits at United Nations climate change meetings to anticolonial claims for the right to be cold. The third argument consolidates a theme built across the article regarding how Isabelle Stengers's notion of ecologies of practices provides an approach to geologic extinction that recognizes both relational and nonrelational loss.
Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 2021
Hannah Arendt developed a twofold account of 'being earthbound' directly relevant to Anthropocene... more Hannah Arendt developed a twofold account of 'being earthbound' directly relevant to Anthropocene debates regarding the political. For Arendt, both senses of 'being earthbound' arose as humans began to act into nature, not merely upon it. The first sense is oriented to a political ontology of process, which arose as human actions-political, technological, scientificnullified modernist conceits separating humans from nature. The second sense is one of earth alienation, which is referenced specifically to a scientific praxis coincident with advances in science and technology that alienates common sense experiences in politics. Though not unqualified, these two senses of being earthbound anchor our argument that Arendt offered prescient resources for understanding the political in the Anthropocene at the intersection of science, capital and world. The article ends by contrasting Arendt's account of being earthbound with Bruno Latour's recent interventions on the politics of Gaia.
International Organizations in Global Social Governance, 2021
If you pick up a book on water politics-practically any book on the topic-you are almost certain ... more If you pick up a book on water politics-practically any book on the topic-you are almost certain to find a claim like this: water doesn't obey political boundaries. Usually, the quick inference is that water conflicts are likely; a logical step that combines the fact that water began flowing eons before politics were around to be obeyed with the political reality that many international borders operate with varying degrees of reference to scarce water resources. An arguably more interesting point, however, is the leitmotif such claims convey. Namely, that global water policy requires an effective combination of space and politics. Among the potential combinations, several leading contenders populate a wide literature. There are spaces of empires, nations, states, mega-cities, agricultural regions, watersheds (or river basins), local communities, Indigenous peoples and, increasingly, aquatic ecosystems themselves. Opposite these, politics
Over the last decade, thousands of water ATMs have been installed across the Global South. In Ind... more Over the last decade, thousands of water ATMs have been installed across the Global South. In India, these vending machines increasingly augment both formal and informal networks of water supply and delivery. This article examines media reports on water ATMs in India in order to survey some of the variance across different water ATM technologies with respect to cost, capacity, and fit with infrastructure networks. It then examines how water ATMs are socially and politically positioned with respect to existing, promised, and incomplete infrastructure projects where they are installed: slums, hospitals, commuting routes, railway stations, rural villages, religious sites, and in 'smart city' initiatives. The analysis considers how water ATMs frustrate the distinctions between formal and informal infrastructure that are often used to describe differences in water networks. The article develops a novel approach to water ATMs as 'pop-up infrastructure' in which the movement of matter is operationally independent from, and only contingently reliant on, existing water delivery networks. Despite their unique aspects, water ATMs produce new common borders among social, material, and political relations to water. These relations are often contested and suggest important areas for future research on water ATMs.
Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 2019
The information, practices and views in this article are those of the author(s) and do not necess... more The information, practices and views in this article are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the opinion of the Royal Geographical Society (with IBG).
Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 2018
Since 2006, successive Canadian governments have worked to create private property regimes on lan... more Since 2006, successive Canadian governments have worked to create private property regimes on lands reserved for First Nations. This article examines how the state framed the theory and history of Aboriginal property rights to achieve this goal. It then shows how, under the pretense of restoration, bureaucrats developed legislation that would create novel political spaces where, once converted to private property, reserved lands would function as a new kind of federal municipality in Canada. These changes took place in two ways: First, bureaucrats situated Aboriginal property within the state apparatus and reconfigured Indigenous territorial rights into a series of "regulatory gaps" regarding voting thresholds, certainty of title, and the historical misrepresentation of First Nations economies. Second, the government crafted legislation under what is known as the First Nations Property Ownership Initiative that, by closing regulatory gaps, would produce private property regimes analogous to municipal arrangements elsewhere in Canada. These bureaucratic practices realigned internal state mechanisms to produce novel external boundaries among the state, Indigenous lands, and the economy. By tracking how bureaucratic practices adapted to Indigenous refusals of state agendas, the article shows how the bureaucratic production of territory gave form to a new iteration of settler-colonialism in Canada.
The water-energy-food-climate nexus has risen rapidly in global water governance over the past de... more The water-energy-food-climate nexus has risen rapidly in global water governance over the past decade. This article examines the role of global financial networks in articulating the nexus and in connecting it to sustainability programs. It provides new insights into critical engagements with the nexus that, to date, have focused predominantly on water security and governance. The article examines how global financial networks conceptualized and concretized the nexus towards two ends: First, the nexus was used to effect the transition from state-oriented development models to financialized approaches of water development and sustainability. Here, the nexus was formulated in critique of, and as a solution to, the previously dominant approach to water development: integrated water resources management (IWRM). Second, the nexus was deployed to connect water, energy, food, and climate to the global economy in terms of complex systems. The identification of risks to the resilience of environmental and economic systems provided a new form of integration across the supply chains affected by the governance and security of water, energy, food, and climate. In both cases, the nexus mobilizes technologies of global finance, such as credit-risk ratings, to construct and defend new strategies for governing water security and to enable sub-sovereign actors, such as municipalities, to be incorporated into the global economy. The paper concludes that alignments of the nexus with sustainability programs, and the Sustainable Development Goals, must be reconsidered in view of the constraints posed by financial orientations towards the risks and resilience of economic and environmental systems.
The quantitative evidence of human impacts on the Earth System has produced new calls for planeta... more The quantitative evidence of human impacts on the Earth System has produced new calls for planetary stewardship. At the same time, numerous scholars reject modern social sciences by claiming that the Anthropocene fundamentally changes the human condition. However, we cannot simply dismiss all previous forms of cultural learning or transmission. Instead, this paper examines ethics in the Anthropocene, and specifically what it implies for: (1) reassessing our normative systems in view of human impacts on the Earth System; (2) identifying novel ethical problems in the Anthropocene; and (3) repositioning traditional issues concerning fairness and environmental ethics. It concludes by situating ethics within the challenge of connecting multiple social worlds to a shared view of human and Earth histories and calls for renewed engagement with ethics.
This paper examines the turn to considerations of property in arguments regarding the commons and... more This paper examines the turn to considerations of property in arguments regarding the commons and the human right to water. It identifies commitments to liberalism in political economy approaches to property and human rights and develops a matrix for identifying nonliberal conceptions of the commons. The latter holds potential for an agonistic politics in which human rights are compatible with ecological sensibilities regarding the dynamics of conflict and cooperation in complex systems.
This paper examines the historical claims made in support of the hydrosocial cycle. In particular... more This paper examines the historical claims made in support of the hydrosocial cycle. In particular, it considers how arguments advancing the hydrosocial cycle make historical claims regarding modernist conceptions of what water is (i.e. H 2 O) and its fit with society. The paper gives special emphasis to the society/nature dualism and to the notion of agency as key sites of contest in arguments regarding the hydrosocial cycle. It finds that, while several versions of the hydrosocial cycle seek to advance a political ecology more sensitive to non-human actions, these same accounts often do not address the robust account of non-human agency in the historical record. Evidence is presented regarding water's agency amongst late 19th and early 20th century architects of key water management norms in the United States. This evidence troubles accounts of the hydrosocial cycle that critique the US experience and suggests new directions for rethinking the role of historical and institutional norms in water policy.
Freedom of information requests are an important research tool yet receive comparably little meth... more Freedom of information requests are an important research tool yet receive comparably little methodological scrutiny relative to other methods commonly used by geographers. This article considers two methodological aspects to freedom of information requests. The first is how they operate as "live archives" that take shape as batches of files are compiled in ways that reflect search terms, negotiations over the scope of requests, bureaucratic processes, and considered judgments of researchers in response to variables both within and beyond their control. The second considers how freedom of information requests operate as a political methodology through the encounter they produce with state bureaucracies. Using examples that cut across these concerns and illuminate some of the ways that methodological scrutiny matters, the article discusses how freedom of information requests present overlapping yet distinct concerns for qualitative research on issues of reflexivity, ethics, and positionality. The methodological concerns that arise are not frequently discussed but, as with other methods, are important to understanding the limits and reach of data collection, analysis, and accessibility both for researchers and for the communities who may have interest in, or be impacted by, geographic research.
This paper develops the concept of multispecies thought through a study of dog-walking in a publi... more This paper develops the concept of multispecies thought through a study of dog-walking in a public park in Lancaster, England. It draws on cybernetic ideas from Bateson, Peircean semiotics and von Uexküll's umwelten to explore how multispecies worlds come into being in the spaces of the park, and amongst humans, dogs, leads, toys and other things. It focuses on how an understanding of multispecies thought can be discerned that is not only specific to the situated relations in dogwalks, but also constituted through routines that foster new capacities between specific bodies. In this way, we come to understand multispecies worlds as located at the sites where specific, associated worlds are co-produced by dogs and humans yet reducible to neither. We use the examples of lead-walking and play with balls and frisbees to show how semiotic relations are co-produced across species. Building on previous work, we confront species-defined notions of capacity and thought and look instead at how the indexical relations of multispecies thinking offers liberatory potential.
This article uses water to examine how the relationships of ethics to science are modified throug... more This article uses water to examine how the relationships of ethics to science are modified through the pursuit of Earth stewardship. Earth stewardship is often defined as the use of science to actively shape social-ecological relations by enhancing resilience. The changing relations of science to values are explored by considering how ideas of resilience operate to translate different ways of knowing water into the framework of Earth stewardship. This is not a neutral process, and Earth stewardship requires careful appraisal to ensure other ways of knowing water are not oppressed. Technical summary. Scientific disclosures of anthropogenic impacts on the Earth systemthe Anthropoceneincreasingly come with ethical diagnoses for value transformation and, often, Earth stewardship. This article examines the changing relationship of science to values in calls for Earth stewardship with special attention to water resilience. The article begins by situating recent efforts to reconceptualize human-water relations in view of anthropogenic impacts on the global water system. It then traces some of the ways that Earth stewardship has been articulated, especially as a framework supporting the use of science to actively shape social-ecological relations by enhancing resilience. The shift in relations of ethics and science entailed by Earth stewardship is placed in historical context before the issues of water resilience are examined. Resilience, and critiques of it, are then discussed for how they operate to translate different ways of knowing water into the framework of Earth stewardship. The ethical stakes of such translations are a core concern of the conclusion. Rather than reducing different ways of knowing water to those amendable to the framework of Earth stewardship, the article advances a pluralized approach as needed to respect multiple practices for knowing and relating to waterand resilience. Social media summary. Water resilience is key to Earth stewardship; Jeremy Schmidt examines how it changes relations of science and ethics.
The field of water ethics focuses on the judgments affecting water use and decision making, as we... more The field of water ethics focuses on the judgments affecting water use and decision making, as well as their normative justification. These justifications can take many forms. Consequently, water ethics grapple with philosophical considerations, law, custom, religion, and the practical options available for accessing or distributing water in different contexts. Increasingly, the field also includes active academic support for communities seeking water justice. This review examines these dynamics in three steps. The first section provides a brief history of water ethics as a distinct field of inquiry. It highlights how philosophical approaches to water ethics have been in tension with the use of water ethics to support integrated water resources management. The second section reviews scholarship from multiple disciplines that overlap in their concern regarding ethical relations to water and different ways social norms are justified. This scholarship has pushed the field of water ethics to reflect more critically on what constitutes justification given the diversity and plurality of water norms. The third section examines how the obligations entailed by water ethics are acted upon by scholarly and community initiatives seeking water justice. Here, the article focuses on how the recognition of multiple vectors of inequality has led to a shift towards intersectional ethics. A short conclusion offers no prescriptions but rather encouragement for continued appreciation of how this subfield helps reframe and address urgent water concerns.
This Forum article reports on a meta-review of more than 19,000 published works on water security... more This Forum article reports on a meta-review of more than 19,000 published works on water security, of which less than 1 percent explicitly focus on race or ethnicity. This is deeply concerning, because it indicates that race and ethnicity-crucial factors that affect the provision of safe, reliable water-continue to be ignored in academic and policy literatures. In response to this finding the Forum calls for building intersectional water security frameworks that recognize how empirical drivers of social and environmental inequality vary both within and across groups. Intersectional frameworks of water security can retain policy focus on the key material concerns regarding access, safety, and the distribution of water-related risks. They can also explicitly incorporate issues of race and ethnicity alongside other vectors of inequality to address key, overlooked concerns of water security. Water security scholarship almost uniformly excludes an explicit treatment of race or ethnicity. This is a critical issue, because without an adequate account of water security's relationships to race and ethnicity, crucial factors affecting the provision of safe, reliable water will continue to go unaddressed. In response to this exclusion, we call for intersectional analyses of water security as an anti-oppressive approach that can orient academic and policy analysis to multiple dimensions of inequality and insecurity, including ones dependent on ethnic and racial discrimination. This Forum article proceeds in two steps. First, it highlights the limited attention given to race and ethnicity within water security scholarship. It does so by reporting and discussing the findings from a meta-review of water security scholarship, where less than 1 percent of that scholarship explicitly references
This report on geography and ethics focusses on the justification of normative evaluations. Justi... more This report on geography and ethics focusses on the justification of normative evaluations. Justifying why actions are right or wrong often relies on appeals to high-order principles, such as the common good. But this is not always the case, as this report shows by identifying an ethics of anti-oppression that relies instead on struggles against individual and social harms and the conditions that generate them. Through resistance, ethics of anti-oppression also shift the terms of normative justification across a range of considerations within geography and beyond it, from refugees and asylum seekers to food production and blockades against extractive infrastructure.
This report on geography and ethics focuses on the conditions of ethics. It identifies the ethica... more This report on geography and ethics focuses on the conditions of ethics. It identifies the ethical stakes of how accounts of unequal anthropogenic impacts on the Earth are specified with respect to both injustice and to what are deemed viable futures. It centres arguments of Indigenous and Black scholars regarding kinship and intersectionality, and respective ethical practices of struggle, resurgence and rebellion against the mutual oppression of peoples of colour and the environment. I identify challenges these forms of grounded practices pose to more-than-human geographies and urge an approach to understanding ethical conditions as concrete concerns.
Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 2022
Since 2009, the United Nations programme on Harmony with Nature has sought a new philosophy of gl... more Since 2009, the United Nations programme on Harmony with Nature has sought a new philosophy of global environmental governance known as Earth jurisprudence. This paper examines how Harmony with Nature has advanced Earth jurisprudence to unite Indigenous legal traditions, rights of nature, and mounting
Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space, 2022
In Canada, Indigenous activists and scholars critique municipalization as a threefold process tha... more In Canada, Indigenous activists and scholars critique municipalization as a threefold process that subverts Indigenous authority to the state, then delegates forms of state authority to Indigenous peoples, and concludes by asserting that delegated authority satisfies the terms of Indigenous selfdetermination. This article centers municipalization in two steps that connect it to how Canada divides power regarding foreign and domestic affairs. The first examines the history of municipalization and its evolution alongside changes in Canadian federalism. The second examines dispossession by municipalization to show how state divisions of power facilitate extraction of value from land. It uses a case where the federal government considered creating new, privatized reserves of Indigenous land explicitly to facilitate oil pipelines. Together, these support an argument that municipalization is not only a powerful language of critique, but critical to understanding the ongoing production of settler colonial space.
In 2019 several funerals were held for glaciers. If enough glaciers die, could they go extinct? I... more In 2019 several funerals were held for glaciers. If enough glaciers die, could they go extinct? Is there geologic extinction? Yes. This article develops three arguments to support this claim. The first revisits Georges Cuvier's original argument for extinction and its reliance on geology, especially glaciers. Retracing connections to glaciers and the narrowing of extinction to biological species in the nineteenth century, the author argues that anthropogenic forcing on how the Earth system functions-the Anthropocene-warrants rethinking extinction geologically. The second argument examines the specificity of ice loss and multiple practices responding to this loss: from art exhibits at United Nations climate change meetings to anticolonial claims for the right to be cold. The third argument consolidates a theme built across the article regarding how Isabelle Stengers's notion of ecologies of practices provides an approach to geologic extinction that recognizes both relational and nonrelational loss.
Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 2021
Hannah Arendt developed a twofold account of 'being earthbound' directly relevant to Anthropocene... more Hannah Arendt developed a twofold account of 'being earthbound' directly relevant to Anthropocene debates regarding the political. For Arendt, both senses of 'being earthbound' arose as humans began to act into nature, not merely upon it. The first sense is oriented to a political ontology of process, which arose as human actions-political, technological, scientificnullified modernist conceits separating humans from nature. The second sense is one of earth alienation, which is referenced specifically to a scientific praxis coincident with advances in science and technology that alienates common sense experiences in politics. Though not unqualified, these two senses of being earthbound anchor our argument that Arendt offered prescient resources for understanding the political in the Anthropocene at the intersection of science, capital and world. The article ends by contrasting Arendt's account of being earthbound with Bruno Latour's recent interventions on the politics of Gaia.
International Organizations in Global Social Governance, 2021
If you pick up a book on water politics-practically any book on the topic-you are almost certain ... more If you pick up a book on water politics-practically any book on the topic-you are almost certain to find a claim like this: water doesn't obey political boundaries. Usually, the quick inference is that water conflicts are likely; a logical step that combines the fact that water began flowing eons before politics were around to be obeyed with the political reality that many international borders operate with varying degrees of reference to scarce water resources. An arguably more interesting point, however, is the leitmotif such claims convey. Namely, that global water policy requires an effective combination of space and politics. Among the potential combinations, several leading contenders populate a wide literature. There are spaces of empires, nations, states, mega-cities, agricultural regions, watersheds (or river basins), local communities, Indigenous peoples and, increasingly, aquatic ecosystems themselves. Opposite these, politics
Over the last decade, thousands of water ATMs have been installed across the Global South. In Ind... more Over the last decade, thousands of water ATMs have been installed across the Global South. In India, these vending machines increasingly augment both formal and informal networks of water supply and delivery. This article examines media reports on water ATMs in India in order to survey some of the variance across different water ATM technologies with respect to cost, capacity, and fit with infrastructure networks. It then examines how water ATMs are socially and politically positioned with respect to existing, promised, and incomplete infrastructure projects where they are installed: slums, hospitals, commuting routes, railway stations, rural villages, religious sites, and in 'smart city' initiatives. The analysis considers how water ATMs frustrate the distinctions between formal and informal infrastructure that are often used to describe differences in water networks. The article develops a novel approach to water ATMs as 'pop-up infrastructure' in which the movement of matter is operationally independent from, and only contingently reliant on, existing water delivery networks. Despite their unique aspects, water ATMs produce new common borders among social, material, and political relations to water. These relations are often contested and suggest important areas for future research on water ATMs.
Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 2019
The information, practices and views in this article are those of the author(s) and do not necess... more The information, practices and views in this article are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the opinion of the Royal Geographical Society (with IBG).
Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 2018
Since 2006, successive Canadian governments have worked to create private property regimes on lan... more Since 2006, successive Canadian governments have worked to create private property regimes on lands reserved for First Nations. This article examines how the state framed the theory and history of Aboriginal property rights to achieve this goal. It then shows how, under the pretense of restoration, bureaucrats developed legislation that would create novel political spaces where, once converted to private property, reserved lands would function as a new kind of federal municipality in Canada. These changes took place in two ways: First, bureaucrats situated Aboriginal property within the state apparatus and reconfigured Indigenous territorial rights into a series of "regulatory gaps" regarding voting thresholds, certainty of title, and the historical misrepresentation of First Nations economies. Second, the government crafted legislation under what is known as the First Nations Property Ownership Initiative that, by closing regulatory gaps, would produce private property regimes analogous to municipal arrangements elsewhere in Canada. These bureaucratic practices realigned internal state mechanisms to produce novel external boundaries among the state, Indigenous lands, and the economy. By tracking how bureaucratic practices adapted to Indigenous refusals of state agendas, the article shows how the bureaucratic production of territory gave form to a new iteration of settler-colonialism in Canada.
The water-energy-food-climate nexus has risen rapidly in global water governance over the past de... more The water-energy-food-climate nexus has risen rapidly in global water governance over the past decade. This article examines the role of global financial networks in articulating the nexus and in connecting it to sustainability programs. It provides new insights into critical engagements with the nexus that, to date, have focused predominantly on water security and governance. The article examines how global financial networks conceptualized and concretized the nexus towards two ends: First, the nexus was used to effect the transition from state-oriented development models to financialized approaches of water development and sustainability. Here, the nexus was formulated in critique of, and as a solution to, the previously dominant approach to water development: integrated water resources management (IWRM). Second, the nexus was deployed to connect water, energy, food, and climate to the global economy in terms of complex systems. The identification of risks to the resilience of environmental and economic systems provided a new form of integration across the supply chains affected by the governance and security of water, energy, food, and climate. In both cases, the nexus mobilizes technologies of global finance, such as credit-risk ratings, to construct and defend new strategies for governing water security and to enable sub-sovereign actors, such as municipalities, to be incorporated into the global economy. The paper concludes that alignments of the nexus with sustainability programs, and the Sustainable Development Goals, must be reconsidered in view of the constraints posed by financial orientations towards the risks and resilience of economic and environmental systems.
The quantitative evidence of human impacts on the Earth System has produced new calls for planeta... more The quantitative evidence of human impacts on the Earth System has produced new calls for planetary stewardship. At the same time, numerous scholars reject modern social sciences by claiming that the Anthropocene fundamentally changes the human condition. However, we cannot simply dismiss all previous forms of cultural learning or transmission. Instead, this paper examines ethics in the Anthropocene, and specifically what it implies for: (1) reassessing our normative systems in view of human impacts on the Earth System; (2) identifying novel ethical problems in the Anthropocene; and (3) repositioning traditional issues concerning fairness and environmental ethics. It concludes by situating ethics within the challenge of connecting multiple social worlds to a shared view of human and Earth histories and calls for renewed engagement with ethics.
This paper examines the turn to considerations of property in arguments regarding the commons and... more This paper examines the turn to considerations of property in arguments regarding the commons and the human right to water. It identifies commitments to liberalism in political economy approaches to property and human rights and develops a matrix for identifying nonliberal conceptions of the commons. The latter holds potential for an agonistic politics in which human rights are compatible with ecological sensibilities regarding the dynamics of conflict and cooperation in complex systems.
This paper examines the historical claims made in support of the hydrosocial cycle. In particular... more This paper examines the historical claims made in support of the hydrosocial cycle. In particular, it considers how arguments advancing the hydrosocial cycle make historical claims regarding modernist conceptions of what water is (i.e. H 2 O) and its fit with society. The paper gives special emphasis to the society/nature dualism and to the notion of agency as key sites of contest in arguments regarding the hydrosocial cycle. It finds that, while several versions of the hydrosocial cycle seek to advance a political ecology more sensitive to non-human actions, these same accounts often do not address the robust account of non-human agency in the historical record. Evidence is presented regarding water's agency amongst late 19th and early 20th century architects of key water management norms in the United States. This evidence troubles accounts of the hydrosocial cycle that critique the US experience and suggests new directions for rethinking the role of historical and institutional norms in water policy.
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Papers by Jeremy Schmidt