Juan Carlos Skewes, Debbie Guerra, Gabriel Espinoza Rivera
In the Maule basin, Chile, the domestication of the waters occurs below the line of a thousand meters of altitude, giving rise to the existence of a transition strip which the modernising processes and the elusive practices of mountain populations mutually infiltrate. The strip stands out as a site of confluence of the waters' diverse modes of being, below which stands a waterscape that recreates the environment to naturalise what, in another context, has been the object of dispossession. The Colbún dam and the Panimávida Resort & Spa are iconic of this process in the Maule basin: while erasing all signs of dispossession, these interventions project the image of a narcissistic self-made civilisation. The study of the Colbún area in the Maule basin, central Chile, highlights the multiple historical ways of shaping waterscapes. Water goes through fluctuating conditions depending on how it becomes entangled with social processes. From indigenous daily practices to high-tech engineering, the article suggests the existence of a process of aestheticisation that encompasses the downward movement of the water from the glaciers in the high mountains towards the valleys. Likewise, different epistemologies seem to operate at both sides of the altitudinal divide. This article is both an account of the complex process of statecraft by means of infrastructure, and the overlapped and contested ways such a project imposes ways of framing the material world, more-than-human relationships, time, and urgencies.
{"title":"Friction and the Reconfiguration of Colbún's Waterscape: Manoeuvring Across Troubled Waters in the Chilean Central Andes","authors":"Juan Carlos Skewes, Debbie Guerra, Gabriel Espinoza Rivera","doi":"10.3366/soma.2023.0411","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/soma.2023.0411","url":null,"abstract":"In the Maule basin, Chile, the domestication of the waters occurs below the line of a thousand meters of altitude, giving rise to the existence of a transition strip which the modernising processes and the elusive practices of mountain populations mutually infiltrate. The strip stands out as a site of confluence of the waters' diverse modes of being, below which stands a waterscape that recreates the environment to naturalise what, in another context, has been the object of dispossession. The Colbún dam and the Panimávida Resort & Spa are iconic of this process in the Maule basin: while erasing all signs of dispossession, these interventions project the image of a narcissistic self-made civilisation. The study of the Colbún area in the Maule basin, central Chile, highlights the multiple historical ways of shaping waterscapes. Water goes through fluctuating conditions depending on how it becomes entangled with social processes. From indigenous daily practices to high-tech engineering, the article suggests the existence of a process of aestheticisation that encompasses the downward movement of the water from the glaciers in the high mountains towards the valleys. Likewise, different epistemologies seem to operate at both sides of the altitudinal divide. This article is both an account of the complex process of statecraft by means of infrastructure, and the overlapped and contested ways such a project imposes ways of framing the material world, more-than-human relationships, time, and urgencies.","PeriodicalId":43420,"journal":{"name":"Somatechnics","volume":" 14","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2023-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138618614","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Using a critical legal geography approach that incorporates theories of law, space, and power, this paper explores how the public health surveillance of dengue fever is utilised by the state in an ongoing ‘war against the mosquito’ in Singapore. Here, the state deploys biopower as a form of spatio-legal ‘lawscaping’ – consisting of and implicating a host of actors, institutions, and objects – in order to seek and eradicate sources of stagnant water (and the mosquitoes that breed in them) in spaces across the city. The paper demonstrates how, in combating dengue fever this way, the public health surveillance and regulation of dengue fever in Singapore informs four distinct yet interconnected forms of spatio-legal materiality and normativity: a) the inspection of space; b) the invisibilisation of death; c) the implementation of self-regulatory objects; and d) the illegality of uncleanliness. Therefore, in tracing the public health surveillance of dengue fever as it relates to the biopolitical regulation of stagnant water, this paper is also able to evince how the state uses spatio-legal means to govern a range of sites as well as a host of human and non-human bodies, and in doing so reveal how state biopower can be exerted across different species. At the same time, these acts of biopolitical lawscaping serve to flatten different typologies of urban space – be they public, private, or even transient (or under construction). In its desire to eradicate mosquito breeding grounds, the state reduces urban space to that which is clean and unclean – even if unwittingly.
{"title":"The Somatechnic and Spatio-legal Regulation of Stagnant Water in Singapore","authors":"Dhiraj Nainani","doi":"10.3366/soma.2023.0404","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/soma.2023.0404","url":null,"abstract":"Using a critical legal geography approach that incorporates theories of law, space, and power, this paper explores how the public health surveillance of dengue fever is utilised by the state in an ongoing ‘war against the mosquito’ in Singapore. Here, the state deploys biopower as a form of spatio-legal ‘lawscaping’ – consisting of and implicating a host of actors, institutions, and objects – in order to seek and eradicate sources of stagnant water (and the mosquitoes that breed in them) in spaces across the city. The paper demonstrates how, in combating dengue fever this way, the public health surveillance and regulation of dengue fever in Singapore informs four distinct yet interconnected forms of spatio-legal materiality and normativity: a) the inspection of space; b) the invisibilisation of death; c) the implementation of self-regulatory objects; and d) the illegality of uncleanliness. Therefore, in tracing the public health surveillance of dengue fever as it relates to the biopolitical regulation of stagnant water, this paper is also able to evince how the state uses spatio-legal means to govern a range of sites as well as a host of human and non-human bodies, and in doing so reveal how state biopower can be exerted across different species. At the same time, these acts of biopolitical lawscaping serve to flatten different typologies of urban space – be they public, private, or even transient (or under construction). In its desire to eradicate mosquito breeding grounds, the state reduces urban space to that which is clean and unclean – even if unwittingly.","PeriodicalId":43420,"journal":{"name":"Somatechnics","volume":" 6","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2023-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138618257","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
In a well-known narrative, a body of water intertwined with a suburban landscape in a town near Bogotá, Colombia's capital, is menaced by an expansive real estate industry. This paper offers a historical view on how the marshlands in and around Bogotá were dried. It examines how certain technologies captured, governed, and instrumentalised water. However, water manages to slip through these technologies, defying colonial relations but also falling into certain technoscientific classifications. Consequently, this work aims to go beyond colonial taxonomies of water and nature by focusing on the entanglements of both human and non-human actors through a multispecies ethnography. This allows us to delve deeper into the ways in which water, as a life force, provides the conditions for a rich and biodiverse assembling, letting us be part and witnesses of narratives that challenge the traditional views of Earth and the relationships between humans and the environment, also known as Gaia stories ( Haraway 2019 ). To conclude, we propose an exercise of political imagination through a situated story that helps us imagine a multispecies flourishing future that provides us clues for knitting a more just future for all of us.
{"title":"The Many Names and Shapes of Water: Emergent Narratives on a Non-existing Water Body in Latin America","authors":"David Osorio Vallejo","doi":"10.3366/soma.2023.0413","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/soma.2023.0413","url":null,"abstract":"In a well-known narrative, a body of water intertwined with a suburban landscape in a town near Bogotá, Colombia's capital, is menaced by an expansive real estate industry. This paper offers a historical view on how the marshlands in and around Bogotá were dried. It examines how certain technologies captured, governed, and instrumentalised water. However, water manages to slip through these technologies, defying colonial relations but also falling into certain technoscientific classifications. Consequently, this work aims to go beyond colonial taxonomies of water and nature by focusing on the entanglements of both human and non-human actors through a multispecies ethnography. This allows us to delve deeper into the ways in which water, as a life force, provides the conditions for a rich and biodiverse assembling, letting us be part and witnesses of narratives that challenge the traditional views of Earth and the relationships between humans and the environment, also known as Gaia stories ( Haraway 2019 ). To conclude, we propose an exercise of political imagination through a situated story that helps us imagine a multispecies flourishing future that provides us clues for knitting a more just future for all of us.","PeriodicalId":43420,"journal":{"name":"Somatechnics","volume":" 13","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2023-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138612335","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Joshua St. Pierre, Cheap Talk: Disability and the Politics of Communication","authors":"Péta Phelan","doi":"10.3366/soma.2023.0415","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/soma.2023.0415","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":43420,"journal":{"name":"Somatechnics","volume":" 10","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2023-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138610039","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This paper presents a bespoke postmodern reading of the corporeality and somatechnics of self and other. It situates itself within the transformative transdisciplinary space of critical disability studies. Therein, it reflects upon the speculative boundaries between self and other, in the context of childhood disability and child maltreatment. As such, how the intervals and convergent space of self and other are engendered by technologies and techniques that both safeguard and endanger disabled children, is interrogated with classic postmodern scepticism. The context is, that international evidence places the prevalence of child abuse and neglect at significantly increased levels for disabled children. This is an enduring international problem in which disabled children continue to experience rates of abuse and neglect that far surpass those for non-disabled peers. Concurrently, safeguarding efforts are undermined in ways that are grossly dissimilar to majority population peers, including significant problems in the way that disability is conceptualised and understood. Selective reading of somatic and corporeal, as well as agentic and attitudinal dimensions of the problem, hinge on the theoretical binary of self and other. The intention is to broaden the ways in which the significant problem of safeguarding of disabled children is understood. Assistive technology, surveillance techniques and temporalities, and varied relational technics of safeguarding, all help to embed a more complicated understanding of disability and child maltreatment.
{"title":"Critical Disability Studies, Corporeality and Child Maltreatment: Theorising the Somatechnics of Self and Other","authors":"Susan Flynn","doi":"10.3366/soma.2023.0414","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/soma.2023.0414","url":null,"abstract":"This paper presents a bespoke postmodern reading of the corporeality and somatechnics of self and other. It situates itself within the transformative transdisciplinary space of critical disability studies. Therein, it reflects upon the speculative boundaries between self and other, in the context of childhood disability and child maltreatment. As such, how the intervals and convergent space of self and other are engendered by technologies and techniques that both safeguard and endanger disabled children, is interrogated with classic postmodern scepticism. The context is, that international evidence places the prevalence of child abuse and neglect at significantly increased levels for disabled children. This is an enduring international problem in which disabled children continue to experience rates of abuse and neglect that far surpass those for non-disabled peers. Concurrently, safeguarding efforts are undermined in ways that are grossly dissimilar to majority population peers, including significant problems in the way that disability is conceptualised and understood. Selective reading of somatic and corporeal, as well as agentic and attitudinal dimensions of the problem, hinge on the theoretical binary of self and other. The intention is to broaden the ways in which the significant problem of safeguarding of disabled children is understood. Assistive technology, surveillance techniques and temporalities, and varied relational technics of safeguarding, all help to embed a more complicated understanding of disability and child maltreatment.","PeriodicalId":43420,"journal":{"name":"Somatechnics","volume":" 362","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2023-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138610979","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This article explores how water acts on permeable housing and the documentary infrastructures that mitigate its impact and enable its flows. It does so through consideration of ongoing litigation brought by public housing tenants at the remote communities of Ltyentye Apurte (Santa Teresa) and Laramba in the Northern Territory of Australia for incomplete repairs and unsafe drinking water. I offer a distinction between pragmatist and functionalist housing, as competing concepts for framing, respectively, the impact of entrenched low expectations on remote housing performance and management and the minimum amenity that contemporary housing should provide. The litigation by Ltyentye Apurte and Laramba householders is notable for challenging the habitability standard that remote community housing must meet and for introducing the provision of safe drinking water as a matter of habitable housing. While water searches out cracks and refuses expulsion from the housing assemblage, necessitating repairs and maintenance, such mobility provides a challenge for allocating specific obligations to various settler colonial authorities that are collectively involved in maintaining house function. Drawing on close analyses of a series of legal decisions, the article examines how legal frameworks and intra-governmental funding arrangements are employed to eschew responsibility for safe drinking water inside remote community housing.
{"title":"Permeable Housing","authors":"Liam Grealy","doi":"10.3366/soma.2023.0410","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/soma.2023.0410","url":null,"abstract":"This article explores how water acts on permeable housing and the documentary infrastructures that mitigate its impact and enable its flows. It does so through consideration of ongoing litigation brought by public housing tenants at the remote communities of Ltyentye Apurte (Santa Teresa) and Laramba in the Northern Territory of Australia for incomplete repairs and unsafe drinking water. I offer a distinction between pragmatist and functionalist housing, as competing concepts for framing, respectively, the impact of entrenched low expectations on remote housing performance and management and the minimum amenity that contemporary housing should provide. The litigation by Ltyentye Apurte and Laramba householders is notable for challenging the habitability standard that remote community housing must meet and for introducing the provision of safe drinking water as a matter of habitable housing. While water searches out cracks and refuses expulsion from the housing assemblage, necessitating repairs and maintenance, such mobility provides a challenge for allocating specific obligations to various settler colonial authorities that are collectively involved in maintaining house function. Drawing on close analyses of a series of legal decisions, the article examines how legal frameworks and intra-governmental funding arrangements are employed to eschew responsibility for safe drinking water inside remote community housing.","PeriodicalId":43420,"journal":{"name":"Somatechnics","volume":" 11","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2023-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138616511","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Somatechnics of Water: Part 2","authors":"H. Randell-Moon","doi":"10.3366/soma.2023.0409","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/soma.2023.0409","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":43420,"journal":{"name":"Somatechnics","volume":" 15","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2023-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138612847","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Water scarcity has become a permanent feature in Himalayan cities. Despite the recurrent events of the water crisis in Himalayan cities, the relationship between urban space and water scarcity has not received sufficient attention in the urban studies literature in India. Water scarcity is rooted both in the water infrastructure inherited during the precolonial and colonial periods meant for the population of that time and the resulting racial exclusionary practices. In the context of countries like India, or what we collectively call Southern Urbanisation, whenever there is a water crisis, the water infrastructure built during the colonial period is blamed solely for the crisis without considering the historicity of the production of these infrastructures within the urban space. Colonialism is a significant factor in understanding urbanisation in the Indian context, it is still prominent, even more so in the context of mountain urbanisation in India, where many new urban centers like Shimla, Darjeeling, and Murry emerged as the new centers of colonial domination in the second half of the nineteenth century. The urban space of the region is both a socio-temporal space produced through colonialism and a geographically contingent place. Therefore water scarcity needs to be analysed by combining these two factors. In this paper, I will contextualise water scarcity in the context of Himalayan urbanisation where the production of urban space is intertwined with the case of Shimla. The case study of the spatial development of Shimla shows how the urban space in Himalaya and its relationship with water scarcity require a separate field of inquiry within urban studies in the global south.
{"title":"City on a Hill: Historical Spatiality of Water Scarcity in Shimla","authors":"Ankur Parashar","doi":"10.3366/soma.2023.0412","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/soma.2023.0412","url":null,"abstract":"Water scarcity has become a permanent feature in Himalayan cities. Despite the recurrent events of the water crisis in Himalayan cities, the relationship between urban space and water scarcity has not received sufficient attention in the urban studies literature in India. Water scarcity is rooted both in the water infrastructure inherited during the precolonial and colonial periods meant for the population of that time and the resulting racial exclusionary practices. In the context of countries like India, or what we collectively call Southern Urbanisation, whenever there is a water crisis, the water infrastructure built during the colonial period is blamed solely for the crisis without considering the historicity of the production of these infrastructures within the urban space. Colonialism is a significant factor in understanding urbanisation in the Indian context, it is still prominent, even more so in the context of mountain urbanisation in India, where many new urban centers like Shimla, Darjeeling, and Murry emerged as the new centers of colonial domination in the second half of the nineteenth century. The urban space of the region is both a socio-temporal space produced through colonialism and a geographically contingent place. Therefore water scarcity needs to be analysed by combining these two factors. In this paper, I will contextualise water scarcity in the context of Himalayan urbanisation where the production of urban space is intertwined with the case of Shimla. The case study of the spatial development of Shimla shows how the urban space in Himalaya and its relationship with water scarcity require a separate field of inquiry within urban studies in the global south.","PeriodicalId":43420,"journal":{"name":"Somatechnics","volume":"56 2","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2023-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138622667","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Sherene Razack, <i>Nothing Has To Make Sense: Upholding White Supremacy Through Anti-Muslim Racism</i>","authors":"Kawsar Ali","doi":"10.3366/soma.2023.0405","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/soma.2023.0405","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":43420,"journal":{"name":"Somatechnics","volume":"222 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135005502","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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