Disciplining Water – Risk, Environmental Politics, and the Return of Infrastructure
Author: Brian F O'Neill, brianfoneill1731@gmail.com
Department: Sociology
University: University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, United States
Supervisor: Zsuzsa Gille
Year of completion: In progress
Language of dissertation: English
Keywords:
politics
, water
, risk
, environment
Areas of Research:
Environment and Society
, Economy and Society
, Local-Global Relations
Abstract
The twentieth century witnessed an unprecedented proliferation of infrastructure and technology to manage water resources on a massive scale. By the late 1980’s, the “big dam era” was declared to have ended, yet scholars are now observing a “return to infrastructure.” This research focuses on the case of one type of large-scale water infrastructure, desalination - the process of turning the ocean into drinking water - to examine how coastal cities are pursuing water as a resource to be appropriated by urban areas to “drought-proof” growing populations. The research synthesizes environmental sociology, economic sociology, and the sociology of valuation, and incorporates political ecology to analyze emerging water supply issues. The analysis aims to critique and deepen contemporary theories of risk and environmental politics, inflecting them with questions of valuation and markets. The project foregrounds the notion of “disciplining water” to emphasize how water, a natural compound, is in Karl Polanyi’s terminology, transformed into a fictitious commodity - it must be disciplined to be produced for consumption by society. Furthermore, this political and environmentally contentious “technological fix” to the crisis of water “underproduction” is built on the back of a risk/power sharing Public Private Partnership paradigm involving multiple scales of action ranging from the grassroots to transnational private equity firms. Using ethnographic and archival data, the research examines the social processes revolving around this industry by focusing on the case of Southern California, where the majority of these projects exist or have been proposed in the United States.
