Just one rain away : the ethnography of river city flood control /
Not long ago it seemed flood control experts were close to mastering the unruly flows funneling toward Hudson Bay and the prairie city of Winnipeg. But as more intense and out-of-synch flood events occur, wary cities like Winnipeg continue to depend on systems and specifications that will soon be ou...
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| Format: | Book |
| Language: | English |
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Montreal ; Kingston :
McGill-Queen's University Press,
[2022].
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| Summary: | Not long ago it seemed flood control experts were close to mastering the unruly flows funneling toward Hudson Bay and the prairie city of Winnipeg. But as more intense and out-of-synch flood events occur, wary cities like Winnipeg continue to depend on systems and specifications that will soon be out of date. Rivers have impulses that defy many of the basic human assumptions underpinning otherwise sophisticated technologies. This is the river-city expression of climate change. In Just One Rain Away, Stephanie Kane shows how geoscience, engineering and law converge to affect flood control in Winnipeg. She questions technicalities produced and maintained in tandem with settler folkways at the expense of the plural legal cultures of Indigenous nations. The dynamics of this experimental ethnography feel familiar yet strange. Here, many of the starring actors are not human. Ice and water, materializing as bodies, elements and digital signals, act with diatoms, diversions, sensors, sandbags and satellites, looping theories about glacial erratics and feminist science studies into scenes from neighborhood parks, conferences, survey maps, plays, archival photos, a novel, an emergency press conference, LiDAR images and a lab experiment in a bathtub. Through storytelling and environmental analytics, Just One Rain Away provides a starting point for cross-cultural discussions about how expert knowledge and practice should inform egalitarian decision-making about flood control and, more broadly, decolonize current ways of thinking, being and becoming with rivers. |
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| Physical Description: | xvii, 315 pages : illustrations, maps ; 24 cm. |
| Bibliography: | Includes bibliographical references (pages 281-301) and index. |
| ISBN: | 9780228014270 0228014271 9780228014287 022801428X |