Hidden Flows: Hydropower and the Rhythms of Development on the Mekong
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The Xayaburi Hydroelectric Power Project entered operation in October 2019. After this the Mekong started to behave strangely—the water ran blue and clear instead of red and silty, and the great backflow of the river into Cambodia's Tonle Sap Lake arrived off schedule or, at times, threatened to not arrive at all. Villagers who had remained ambivalent or apathetic about hydropower issues suddenly found themselves facing a radically altered world, where a seemingly distant power was able to dramatically alter the nature of their every day. These shifts introduced an arrhythmia into the hydroscape: ecological, fishing, and religious cycles adapted to a seasonal river were off sync with power demands. The radical alteration that dams make to the landscape, in the promise of irrigation, electrification, and the sheer feat of changing a river, are a tangible symbol of the state's power over its land. But with a deep look into hydropower projects—in this case, the dams across the midstream of the Mekong in Laos and China—the story grows more convoluted. Here are conflicting narratives of power: state-focused, international, and royalist; as well as religious, ecological, and hydrosocial. Here, too, as I found in my eight years of fieldwork in Lao-speaking Thailand, is an alteration in time, where the rhythms of the river change the rhythms of life, and where the cyclical riparian clock clashes with a future-oriented developmentalist notion of time.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 teacher head, 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".