Fluid Ecologies: 2019 CSA Faculty Conference

Organizers: Maira Hayat (Stanford Anthropology & Woods Institute) and Jisha Menon (TAPS & Center for South Asia Chair)

How does water participate in political, social and economic projects and in so doing trans/form them? How is water measured, managed, feared and worried over, and in the process constituted? How does it undermine or shore up profit-maximization, state-building, infrastructure and human rights regimes? How is water valued, by whom and to what ends? And what elisions and distinctions do these valuation regimes stand on?  This conference will bring together Stanford affiliates and other scholars who work on these aspects to generate conversation on the ecology -- in its political, economic and social dimensions - of water in diverse socio-political locations.

Discussant/Chair: James Ferguson (Stanford University)

Jessica Cattelino (University of California- Los Angeles) “Passions for Interests: Water and Rural Political Belonging”

Mona Bhan (Depauw University) “ ‘Blood and Water Cannot Flow Together’: The Indus Water Treaty and its Afterlife in Kashmir”

Maira Hayat (Stanford University) “10 km of Responsibility: Corporate Water Stewardship and Adjudications of the Publicness of Water in Pakistan"

Discussant/Chair: Thomas Blom Hansen (Stanford University)

Ashley Carse (Vanderbilt University) “Anticipatory Repair: Environmental Mitigation and Aquatic Life in the Savannah Harbor Expansion Project”

Isha Ray (University of California- Berkeley) “From Intermittent to Continuous Water Supply: A Multi-dimensional View of Water Reforms in urban India”

Dean Chahim (Stanford University) “The Sinking City and the Giant Sewer: Challenges to Urban Growth in Mid-20th Century Mexico City”

Discussant/Chair: Mikael D Wolfe (Stanford University)

Sarah Vaughn (University of California- Berkeley) “Watermarks: Memory and Flood Insurance”

Dilshanie Perera (Stanford University) “Uncertain Science: Weather Prediction as Atmospheric Governance in Bangladesh”

Andrea Ballestero (Rice University) “Surrendering to the Pull, Underground Water in Movement”

David Gilmartin (North Carolina State University) “Water and Sovereignty in the Indus Basin during the Modern Period”