Welcome to Panel 3 of the Water Infrastructure & Regional Infrastructure workshops. Please feel free to pose questions to our panelists via the Q&A and Chat functions.

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Prompt 1: How are infrastructural inequities produced and managed across regional space in your case sites?

With apologies, I forgot to mention my collaborators and coauthors: Marissa Matsler, Ruthann Richards, Olivia Pierce, and Zenya Lederman

Mike, thanks for your comment. There’s a vast body of feminist critiques of ‘empowerment’, and also of the deployment of ‘community’, mostly from development work in the Global South, that is extremely pertinent here in the Global North - but these cirques are often not engaged with. The critiques are precisely what you mentioned (as well as more complex ideas of neoliberal individualizing, fetishizing the ‘community’ and ‘participation’, and inattention to power structures, among others). I wonder if regional infrastructure scholars could be encouraged to engage with such scholarship (often coming out of the development studies, development geography, feminist work across disciplines, etc)? Thanks! - Farhana Sultana

Thank you Farhana, I am glad you are here! Marissa and I have been talking a lot about this, particularly in terms of the politics of care and maintenance. We would very much welcome a conversation with feminist development work.

Thanks Farhana! That's an important intervention and I'll prompt the panelists for their responses: these are definitely themes that were also raised in the keynote and other panel sessions this week.

Thanks Mike (I suppose I should specify given the two Michaels lol but thanks to you both). Mike F, am happy to help (please feel free to email me?). Mike G, great to hear it’s come up before (I was able to attend the opening plenary until the Q&A, but was in meetings/teaching for the others so missed those). I hope these overlapping conversations can be encouraged & fostered.

Yes, just wrote a note to myself to email you, Farhana. Looking forward to it.

:)

Some of broader issues that are of interest relate to the ways that we bring engineering/biophysical/ecological concerns together with the critical / equity perspectives. How everyone is working to do so, and what the challenges may be. A lot of the recent critical infrastructure work is an excellent example of how this might be done, and addresses some of the goals and concerns that were long expressed in political ecology discussions.

Thank you Leila!

There’s a great example of the CWSP program in Portland

Dr. Matsler knows this case well

Thank you! Very interesting work all around

Thanks everyone. very interesting and compelling work.

yes, thanks Michael et al!