Water infrastructure: A terrain for studying nonhuman agency, power relations, and socioeconomic change

Abstract

In recent years attention has been paid to the matter of waters' infrastructure as part of a broader social science inquiry into infrastructure systems. From different approaches, works have documented how as infrastructure extracts, contains, channels, processes, leaks, or distributes waters it produces new kinds of spaces and reproduces inequalities or differences between them. Scholars studying water infrastructure have also participated in debates on nonhuman agency, materiality, and malfunction. This article provides a summarized account of the main strands of this literature with the purpose of providing an introductory overview of analyses on water infrastructure. This article is categorized under: Engineering Water > Sustainable Engineering of Water Human Water > Water Governance