Contested Waters: Political Ontologies of Water and the Production of Risk in First Nations Water Systems
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Indigenous communities in Canada are disproportionately affected by unsafe and insecure water systems. While inadequate federal funding and regulatory gaps have been identified as key barriers to the provision of safe drinking water on reserves, much less attention has been paid to the ways in which water quality risks are defined and managed by state actors, and the consequences of these rationalities and technologies of regulation for Indigenous peoples. Renewed ethnographic attention to infrastructure has called attention to the ways in which infrastructures are critical sites through which narratives, technological assemblages, ideologies, political rationalities, aesthetics, and sensory experiences are produced, encountered, and contested. Infrastructures and their administration are also deeply biopolitical projects that facilitate discipline and control. In this article, we show how water infrastructures are closely tied to ongoing colonial processes that serve to subjugate and, at times, blame Indigenous people for insecure water quality on reserves. In doing so, we interrogate the normative practices and techniques through which the Canadian state assesses water quality risks in Indigenous communities and the associated consequences for water governance.
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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 | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.012 | 0.051 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".