Water­shed Col­lab­o­ra­tions: Entan­gle­ments on com­mon streams

In the tra­di­tion of Barad and Har­away, I prac­tice Sci­ence and Tech­nol­ogy Stud­ies (STS) "from the inside", draw­ing on my own nat­ural sci­ence train­ing to inform the the­o­ret­i­cal frame­works I develop. My inter­dis­ci­pli­nary out­look is grounded in train­ing, pub­li­ca­tion, and research in hydrol­ogy, aquatic ecol­ogy, and flu­vial geo­mor­phol­ogy, as well as in social sci­ence and STS. I am ded­i­cated to an inter­dis­ci­pli­nary approach to study­ing human-nature inter­ac­tions. This kind of approach can reveal why tra­di­tional adap­tive man­age­ment approaches often fail; this approach then gen­er­ates new ways of pro­duc­ing knowl­edge that attend to ten­sions between sci­ence and local knowl­edge with­out dis­miss­ing either. In my dis­ser­ta­tion research on juve­nile salmonid sur­vival in inter­mit­tent streams, I put this approach to the test. I devel­oped my research ques­tions in con­ver­sa­tion with the local water­shed coun­cil and agency sci­en­tists and local res­i­dents; con­ducted three sea­sons of field data col­lec­tion, in col­lab­o­ra­tion with sci­en­tists from mul­ti­ple agen­cies; ini­ti­ated and devel­oped citizen-science stream map­ping and spring mon­i­tor­ing pro­grams; and facil­i­tated two work­shops that brought all these par­tic­i­pants together to explore dif­fer­ent ways of know­ing and inves­ti­gat­ing streams.

Speaker: Cleo Woelfle-Erskine, UC Berkeley