Zones of Sacrifice: Water Risk, Migration and the Magnification of Climate Change
Anthropology Spring Colloquium Series
12:00 pm –
1:15 pm
Oldfather Hall
Room: 827
660 N 12th St
Lincoln NE 68508
Lincoln NE 68508
Additional Info: OLDH
Contact:
UNL Anthropology, (402) 472-2411
Join the UNL Anthropology department for their Spring Colloquium Series, “Zones of Sacrifice: Water Risk, Migration and the Magnification of Climate Change” by Dr. Heather O’Leary of Washington University in St. Louis.
The millions that live in Delhi’s underserved water communities grow each day with 1,000 new in-migrant residents pursuing the Indian middle-class dream or seeking refuge from multi-scalar rural risks and disinvestment. This includes the life-giving, socio-economic lubricant: water. Many must grapple with the new urban culture which mediates their relationships with other people and the natural world. Water is made here—in these moments of learning how to be a proper new resident of the nation’s capitol. Yet today’s water culture is fashioned and refashioned by not only those “pukka” citizens with uncontested membership to the city, but also by those unacknowledged workers who build urban culture with their seemingly invisible actions. The negotiations of water security and urban membership are in no place more contested than in the interstitial places of the city—and this is the heart of my ethnography. I examine the unacknowledged places-between-the-places that are the ideological models for value-laden judgments about neoliberal development’s failures and successes. In India’s climate risk zones, like other risk zones worldwide, security hinges on safeguarding everyday relations with water. These highly unequal relations with water only promise to grow more unstable as today’s systems struggle to keep up with growing risk and displacement due to climate change. It is here, in the forgotten places-between that dynamic negotiations and enactments of water security are predictors for India’s water future.
The millions that live in Delhi’s underserved water communities grow each day with 1,000 new in-migrant residents pursuing the Indian middle-class dream or seeking refuge from multi-scalar rural risks and disinvestment. This includes the life-giving, socio-economic lubricant: water. Many must grapple with the new urban culture which mediates their relationships with other people and the natural world. Water is made here—in these moments of learning how to be a proper new resident of the nation’s capitol. Yet today’s water culture is fashioned and refashioned by not only those “pukka” citizens with uncontested membership to the city, but also by those unacknowledged workers who build urban culture with their seemingly invisible actions. The negotiations of water security and urban membership are in no place more contested than in the interstitial places of the city—and this is the heart of my ethnography. I examine the unacknowledged places-between-the-places that are the ideological models for value-laden judgments about neoliberal development’s failures and successes. In India’s climate risk zones, like other risk zones worldwide, security hinges on safeguarding everyday relations with water. These highly unequal relations with water only promise to grow more unstable as today’s systems struggle to keep up with growing risk and displacement due to climate change. It is here, in the forgotten places-between that dynamic negotiations and enactments of water security are predictors for India’s water future.