Sayd Randle
Biographic Data
| ID | 117402 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Sayd Randle |
| GIVEN NAMES | Sayd |
| FAMILY NAME | Randle |
| SIGNATURE | RANDLE S |
| AFFILIATIONS | Singapore Management University |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-3252-379X |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 15 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 48 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 15 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2016 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
Political Ecologies of Storage for the 21 st Century
New resource storage arrangements are proliferating rapidly both in terms of physical infrastructures—for the storage of things like “clean” energy, nuclear waste, carbon dioxide, fresh water, and data—and as part of a set of discursive moves that reinforce a vision of a near future world in which problems of climate change mitigation and adaptation in particular (but also issues like energy security, water security, industry growth, etc.) are so…
Wild Hogs in the Water: Contested Infrastructural Ecologies of Reservoir Storage in Texas
Reservoirs are developed to store water in reserve for future use. But once built, reservoir sites inevitably hold more than just water, often serving as a key habitat for a range of species. This paper examines how one such animal has transformed water storage facilities and nearby landscapes into contested ground in urbanising areas of Texas, USA. Living around the reservoirs, feral hogs complicate the process of urbanisation by degrading the s…
A ‘City in Nature’ and its porcine interlopers: Confronting the edges of urban ecological order
Initiatives intended to manage urban environments as functional ecosystems are on the rise globally. Approaching city land as terrain that might, if properly cultivated, provide human residents with prioritized ecosystem services and benefits, such efforts take a decidedly instrumental approach to these landscapes. Critical geographers have emphasized the biopolitical dimensions of these interventions, foregrounding the imbrication of other-than-…
Ecological responsibility in the city: The Surfaces and Volumes of Urban Mosquito Management
Engineering immunity? Biotechnical governance and the experimental failures of project wolbachia in Singapore
This paper introduces the idea of 'experimental failure' to critically interrogate the limits of engineering biological systems for urban governance. Whilst experimentation through projects related to smart cities and eco-cities has garnered significant attention, biotechnical experiments--which manipulate living organisms through technology--remain underexplored. Unlike interventions leveraging non-living, inanimate systems, engineering life mus…
Geographies of storage
Resource storage has long played a key role in the production of socio-ecological arrangements and economic relations. Even so, storage as a concept has remained somewhat marginal within geographical scholarship, often obscured by an analytical focus on the dynamics of movement. Reviewing recent works from geography, science and technology studies, and anthropology that center sites and practices of storage, this essay elaborates the diverse ways…
Big infrastructure and/as systemic flexibility: The Sites Reservoir story
If constructed as planned, the Sites Reservoir Project will add roughly 1.85 billion m3 (1.5 million acre-feet) of storage capacity to California's water system. Per project proponents, however, the reservoir complex should be understood as infrastructure that would not only increase available water supply but also provide the state's water network with an infusion of a vital systemic quality: flexibility. This article considers such discourses o…
Disrupting the Grid: Encountering Fire and Smoke through Energy Infrastructures
Experiences of fires are mediated by energy infrastructures and refracted through social inequality and difference. In California, a state marked by increasingly intense and frequent wildfires, the grid is a source of fire risk, with historically marginalized groups bearing the brunt of exposures to wildfire smoke. Drawing on research conducted by one of the co-authors in collaboration with California's Karuk Tribe and Blue Lake Rancheria Tribes,…
Holding water for the city: Emergent geographies of storage and the urbanization of nature
In the US West, water stories are often aqueduct stories, narratives of moving the vital resource from one place to another. This paper, in contrast, explores nascent efforts to keep the water still, in the name of helping buffer cities from the anticipated impacts of climate change. Scripted as potential holding sites for an urban water reserve, aquifers and the task of filling them now orient a range of policies and material investments across …
Ecosystem duties, green infrastructure, and environmental injustice in Los Angeles
In Los Angeles, water managers and environmentalist NGOs champion green infrastructure retrofits, installations intended to maximize the water-absorbing capacity of the urban landscape. In such arrangements, the work of water management is necessarily spread among a more-than-human community, including (but certainly not limited to) humans, plants, soils, and gravels. This article analyzes the human labor within these collaborations, tracking whe…
On Aqueducts and Anxiety: Water Infrastructure, Ruination, and a Region-Scaled Anthropocene Imaginary
This paper explores popular expectations for and meanings of the U.S. West’s environmental future, as articulated through recent artistic representations of the Los Angeles’s expansive water provision network. Weaving together material from participant observation and readings of creative works, I show how infrastructural imagery is used to index anxieties about a future of water scarcity. Presenting familiar, currently functional water infrastru…
Missing power: Nostalgia and disillusionment among Southern California water engineers
California's sprawling network of aqueducts and dams is often cited as the embodiment of a high-modernist approach to resource management. But while once widely celebrated, in recent decades this infrastructural system and the institutions that manage it have been the subject of growing criticism and shrinking funding streams. Based on ethnographic research among employees at several California water agencies, this article explores the sense of n…
Battling Over Bathwater: Greywater Technopolitics in Los Angeles
In Los Angeles, domestic wastewater recycling ("greywater") systems are controversial, loved by local environmentalists and disdained by the city's water agencies. Drawing on fieldwork among greywater advocates and public water agency workers, this article examines how greywater systems function as nodes that unsettle relations between residents and the public agencies that manage the city's water grid. Elaborating the longstanding frictions over…
Landscapes of power: Politics of energy in the Navajo Nation
Remote, extractive landscapes are often marked by persistent pollution, particularly when the extracted resource in question comes from underground and serves as a source of energy. The toxic legac
Unsustainability in action
This chapter presents a pair of case studies that illustrate ways in which claims about unsustainability function to either challenge or reproduce current power relations and political economies. In Peru, indigenous peoples point to the unsustainability of extractive industries and other state-sponsored projects in order to reinforce indigenous claims to resources and territories and to confront a development model that favors corporate interests…
Landscapes of power: Politics of energy in the Navajo Nation
Remote, extractive landscapes are often marked by persistent pollution, particularly when the extracted resource in question comes from underground and serves as a source of energy. The toxic legac
Holding water for the city: Emergent geographies of storage and the urbanization of nature
In the US West, water stories are often aqueduct stories, narratives of moving the vital resource from one place to another. This paper, in contrast, explores nascent efforts to keep the water still, in the name of helping buffer cities from the anticipated impacts of climate change. Scripted as potential holding sites for an urban water reserve, aquifers and the task of filling them now orient a range of policies and material investments across …
Geographies of storage
Resource storage has long played a key role in the production of socio-ecological arrangements and economic relations. Even so, storage as a concept has remained somewhat marginal within geographical scholarship, often obscured by an analytical focus on the dynamics of movement. Reviewing recent works from geography, science and technology studies, and anthropology that center sites and practices of storage, this essay elaborates the diverse ways…
Ecosystem duties, green infrastructure, and environmental injustice in Los Angeles
In Los Angeles, water managers and environmentalist NGOs champion green infrastructure retrofits, installations intended to maximize the water-absorbing capacity of the urban landscape. In such arrangements, the work of water management is necessarily spread among a more-than-human community, including (but certainly not limited to) humans, plants, soils, and gravels. This article analyzes the human labor within these collaborations, tracking whe…
On Aqueducts and Anxiety: Water Infrastructure, Ruination, and a Region-Scaled Anthropocene Imaginary
This paper explores popular expectations for and meanings of the U.S. West’s environmental future, as articulated through recent artistic representations of the Los Angeles’s expansive water provision network. Weaving together material from participant observation and readings of creative works, I show how infrastructural imagery is used to index anxieties about a future of water scarcity. Presenting familiar, currently functional water infrastru…
Ecological responsibility in the city: The Surfaces and Volumes of Urban Mosquito Management
Wild Hogs in the Water: Contested Infrastructural Ecologies of Reservoir Storage in Texas
Reservoirs are developed to store water in reserve for future use. But once built, reservoir sites inevitably hold more than just water, often serving as a key habitat for a range of species. This paper examines how one such animal has transformed water storage facilities and nearby landscapes into contested ground in urbanising areas of Texas, USA. Living around the reservoirs, feral hogs complicate the process of urbanisation by degrading the s…
Engineering immunity? Biotechnical governance and the experimental failures of project wolbachia in Singapore
This paper introduces the idea of 'experimental failure' to critically interrogate the limits of engineering biological systems for urban governance. Whilst experimentation through projects related to smart cities and eco-cities has garnered significant attention, biotechnical experiments--which manipulate living organisms through technology--remain underexplored. Unlike interventions leveraging non-living, inanimate systems, engineering life mus…
Missing power: Nostalgia and disillusionment among Southern California water engineers
California's sprawling network of aqueducts and dams is often cited as the embodiment of a high-modernist approach to resource management. But while once widely celebrated, in recent decades this infrastructural system and the institutions that manage it have been the subject of growing criticism and shrinking funding streams. Based on ethnographic research among employees at several California water agencies, this article explores the sense of n…
Big infrastructure and/as systemic flexibility: The Sites Reservoir story
If constructed as planned, the Sites Reservoir Project will add roughly 1.85 billion m3 (1.5 million acre-feet) of storage capacity to California's water system. Per project proponents, however, the reservoir complex should be understood as infrastructure that would not only increase available water supply but also provide the state's water network with an infusion of a vital systemic quality: flexibility. This article considers such discourses o…
Battling Over Bathwater: Greywater Technopolitics in Los Angeles
In Los Angeles, domestic wastewater recycling ("greywater") systems are controversial, loved by local environmentalists and disdained by the city's water agencies. Drawing on fieldwork among greywater advocates and public water agency workers, this article examines how greywater systems function as nodes that unsettle relations between residents and the public agencies that manage the city's water grid. Elaborating the longstanding frictions over…
Unsustainability in action
This chapter presents a pair of case studies that illustrate ways in which claims about unsustainability function to either challenge or reproduce current power relations and political economies. In Peru, indigenous peoples point to the unsustainability of extractive industries and other state-sponsored projects in order to reinforce indigenous claims to resources and territories and to confront a development model that favors corporate interests…
Landscapes of power: Politics of energy in the Navajo Nation
Remote, extractive landscapes are often marked by persistent pollution, particularly when the extracted resource in question comes from underground and serves as a source of energy. The toxic legac
On Aqueducts and Anxiety: Water Infrastructure, Ruination, and a Region-Scaled Anthropocene Imaginary
This paper explores popular expectations for and meanings of the U.S. West’s environmental future, as articulated through recent artistic representations of the Los Angeles’s expansive water provision network. Weaving together material from participant observation and readings of creative works, I show how infrastructural imagery is used to index anxieties about a future of water scarcity. Presenting familiar, currently functional water infrastru…
Missing power: Nostalgia and disillusionment among Southern California water engineers
California's sprawling network of aqueducts and dams is often cited as the embodiment of a high-modernist approach to resource management. But while once widely celebrated, in recent decades this infrastructural system and the institutions that manage it have been the subject of growing criticism and shrinking funding streams. Based on ethnographic research among employees at several California water agencies, this article explores the sense of n…
Battling Over Bathwater: Greywater Technopolitics in Los Angeles
In Los Angeles, domestic wastewater recycling ("greywater") systems are controversial, loved by local environmentalists and disdained by the city's water agencies. Drawing on fieldwork among greywater advocates and public water agency workers, this article examines how greywater systems function as nodes that unsettle relations between residents and the public agencies that manage the city's water grid. Elaborating the longstanding frictions over…
Holding water for the city: Emergent geographies of storage and the urbanization of nature
In the US West, water stories are often aqueduct stories, narratives of moving the vital resource from one place to another. This paper, in contrast, explores nascent efforts to keep the water still, in the name of helping buffer cities from the anticipated impacts of climate change. Scripted as potential holding sites for an urban water reserve, aquifers and the task of filling them now orient a range of policies and material investments across …
Ecosystem duties, green infrastructure, and environmental injustice in Los Angeles
In Los Angeles, water managers and environmentalist NGOs champion green infrastructure retrofits, installations intended to maximize the water-absorbing capacity of the urban landscape. In such arrangements, the work of water management is necessarily spread among a more-than-human community, including (but certainly not limited to) humans, plants, soils, and gravels. This article analyzes the human labor within these collaborations, tracking whe…
Disrupting the Grid: Encountering Fire and Smoke through Energy Infrastructures
Experiences of fires are mediated by energy infrastructures and refracted through social inequality and difference. In California, a state marked by increasingly intense and frequent wildfires, the grid is a source of fire risk, with historically marginalized groups bearing the brunt of exposures to wildfire smoke. Drawing on research conducted by one of the co-authors in collaboration with California's Karuk Tribe and Blue Lake Rancheria Tribes,…
Geographies of storage
Resource storage has long played a key role in the production of socio-ecological arrangements and economic relations. Even so, storage as a concept has remained somewhat marginal within geographical scholarship, often obscured by an analytical focus on the dynamics of movement. Reviewing recent works from geography, science and technology studies, and anthropology that center sites and practices of storage, this essay elaborates the diverse ways…
Big infrastructure and/as systemic flexibility: The Sites Reservoir story
If constructed as planned, the Sites Reservoir Project will add roughly 1.85 billion m3 (1.5 million acre-feet) of storage capacity to California's water system. Per project proponents, however, the reservoir complex should be understood as infrastructure that would not only increase available water supply but also provide the state's water network with an infusion of a vital systemic quality: flexibility. This article considers such discourses o…
Political Ecologies of Storage for the 21 st Century
New resource storage arrangements are proliferating rapidly both in terms of physical infrastructures—for the storage of things like “clean” energy, nuclear waste, carbon dioxide, fresh water, and data—and as part of a set of discursive moves that reinforce a vision of a near future world in which problems of climate change mitigation and adaptation in particular (but also issues like energy security, water security, industry growth, etc.) are so…
Wild Hogs in the Water: Contested Infrastructural Ecologies of Reservoir Storage in Texas
Reservoirs are developed to store water in reserve for future use. But once built, reservoir sites inevitably hold more than just water, often serving as a key habitat for a range of species. This paper examines how one such animal has transformed water storage facilities and nearby landscapes into contested ground in urbanising areas of Texas, USA. Living around the reservoirs, feral hogs complicate the process of urbanisation by degrading the s…
A ‘City in Nature’ and its porcine interlopers: Confronting the edges of urban ecological order
Initiatives intended to manage urban environments as functional ecosystems are on the rise globally. Approaching city land as terrain that might, if properly cultivated, provide human residents with prioritized ecosystem services and benefits, such efforts take a decidedly instrumental approach to these landscapes. Critical geographers have emphasized the biopolitical dimensions of these interventions, foregrounding the imbrication of other-than-…
Ecological responsibility in the city: The Surfaces and Volumes of Urban Mosquito Management
Engineering immunity? Biotechnical governance and the experimental failures of project wolbachia in Singapore
This paper introduces the idea of 'experimental failure' to critically interrogate the limits of engineering biological systems for urban governance. Whilst experimentation through projects related to smart cities and eco-cities has garnered significant attention, biotechnical experiments--which manipulate living organisms through technology--remain underexplored. Unlike interventions leveraging non-living, inanimate systems, engineering life mus…
Water Governance and Infrastructure (12 works) · Law (10 works) · Political science (10 works) · Geographies of human-animal interactions (8 works) · Sociology (8 works) · Environmental planning (7 works) · Geography (7 works) · Environmental Science (6 works) · Politics (6 works) · Computer Science (5 works)