« Ignoring settler colonialism: Melissa Forcione, Christopher Lamb, Kim Buitenhuis, Anne Godlewska, ‘Settler-colonial geographical ignorance in Canadian education’, EPF: Philosophy, Theory, Models, Methods and Practice, 2023
Music to settler ears: Jody Stark, ‘”Unpacking the Keeper Current” of Settler Colonialism: Why Decolonizing Work is Complicated for (White) Music Educators’, Action, Criticism, and Theory for Music Education, 22, 2, 2023, pp. 37–62 »

Hydraulic settler colonialism: Adrian Drummond-Cole, Making Water Liquid: Hydraulic Settlement in California’s Central Valley, PhD dissertation, UC Santa Cruz, 2023

19Sep23

Abstract: Making Water Liquid: Hydraulic Settlement in California’s Central Valley provides a social, spatial, and historical account of the role of water management in the Anglo conquest of California. This work focuses on the San Joaquin Valley from the mid-nineteenth century until the mid-twentieth century to evaluate efforts by settlers, farmers, scientists, engineers, and administrators to render land and water into objects of knowledge, ownership, investment, and use. Drawing on archival research and fieldwork, I develop the concept of hydraulic settlement to describe the strategic use of hydraulic infrastructure, governmental institutions, and financial instruments to carry out a mode of colonial settlement and capital accumulation defined by its relationship to the manipulation and control of water. Charting a contingent history from Indigenous reservations and swampland reclamation through canal irrigation, hydraulical materialism, and political hydrography to water districts, groundwater extraction, and the bonds of settlement, this research reveals how the seemingly neutral processes used to manage, measure, and monetize water belie understudied histories of dispossession, exclusion, inequality, and violence.


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