Hydrocolonial Affects: Suicide and the Somatechnics of Long-term Drinking Water Advisories in First Nations in Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
While most Canadians have access to potable drinking water, those without are overwhelmingly Indigenous people living on reserves, constituting a racialised form of water injustice. Suicide rates for First Nations are also disproportionate to the general population, but lessor known is the relationship of suicide in communities experiencing long-term drinking water advisories. In this paper, drawing on Indigenous feminist conceptualisations of affect, I consider the affective relationship between long-term water advisories, suicide, and hydrocolonialism. I argue that long-term drinking water advisories are a kind of somatechnic that elucidate the hydrocolonial and necropolitical states of exception that threaten and devalue Indigenous life. Under such somatechnics, I work with the analytic of felt theory, to understand the hydrocolonial affects at play in the prevalence of suicide in communities experiencing long-term water advisories. By making felt the necropolitical connections between bodies of water and the bodies of suicidal people, these affects upend dominant claims about suicide, and invite us towards more fulsome structural analyses of suicide, more agentic renderings of suicidal people, and more politically enlivened ways of addressing suicide. Finally, hydrocolonial affects invite consideration of the possibilities of care and resistance for human and older-than-human relations. In summary, this paper theorises the hydrocolonial affects produced by dead and dying water and suicidal people as a profound challenge to the settler colonial state, and an invitation to produce futures committed to liveability.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.012 | 0.007 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".