This studio offers you the opportunity to apply your knowledge and skills in a multidisciplinary team exploring the dam as a modern, controversial global technical, environmental and social project with major local impacts.
It would not be an exaggeration to say that the dam was the quintessential utopian vehicle of the 20th century. Its appeal lay in the promise of free and clean energy, the infinite supply of water and the malleability of ecologies and societies. The belief in modernity through this kind of top-down engineering has always been challenged, but in recent decades the dam has been the subject of fierce protest movements around the world as never before, and for exactly the same reasons: the political process by which they were implemented, the ecological impact, the displacement of populations, and the urbanisation and industrialisation they fostered. The construction of dams is now included in the list of criteria used to measure the Great Acceleration, the post-war expansion that ushered in the Anthropocene.
In this studio, the theme of dams provides an entry point to learn more about the issues of top-down modernisation, environmental and social engineering. After introductory lectures, you will work in groups to understand the dam as a technological project with major environmental and social impacts on local communities. You will learn about the promises and successes of clean energy, water management and the development of disadvantaged regions, as well as the technological failures and sometimes disastrous impacts on indigenous communities. This studio offers the opportunity to invest and enrich your disciplinary knowledge and skills in an interdisciplinary project. As a group, we learn from activists how scientific knowledge can be used in a multi-stakeholder social environment to address one of the most pressing issues of our time.
Objectives
- Acquire knowledge of global dam issues
- Understanding the importance and function of academic knowledge and skills in interdisciplinary teams
- Learning to apply knowledge and skills in the social arena
Group Assignment
The assignment consists of gathering knowledge about specific controversial dam projects, the use of academic knowledge in the design and development of the project and its contestation, based on the collection of materials and establishing contacts with specific non-profit organisations and movements.
Deliverables
A group research paper in the form of a narrative case study, highlighting the issues of dam building and contestation from different perspectives and disciplines, partly based on the input of written material and contact-based knowledge acquired (conversations, interviews and the like), including a reflection on the multidisciplinary input of knowledge.
Study Material
Patrick Mc Cully, Silenced Rivers. The Ecology and Politics of Large Dams. Enlarged and Updatd Edition. London, New Jersey: Zed Books, 2007.
Additional material t.b.a. and for case studies
Weekly Meetings
The meetings will take place on Tuesday evenings from 06.30 – 08.30 pm.
Introduction – 1 October
Introductions
Introduction to the topic: ecological engineering, hydropower, water management, climate change, energy transition, social protests.
(in-class assignment: identifying problems and issues in dam construction and further implications)
Literature: McCully, Silenced Rivers, xv-lxviii (Introduction to the updated edition)
The Problem – 8 October
Dammed Issues. Multi-Purpose Dams. A History
Interdisciplinary Knowledge
(in-class assignment: Group and Plenary reflection on disciplinary knowledge and the deployment of knowledge)
Literature: McCully, Silenced Rivers, 1-28 (chapter one)
Theory - 15 October
Perspectives. Seeing Like a State – The Political Economy of Dams; the Human Costs – Alternatives?
(in-class assignment: In search of specific sites and projects)
Literature: t.b.a.
Contested and Applied Knowledge – 5 November
Local People; Local Knowledge. The Voice of Indigeneity
Protest Collective Action
(in-class assignment: Search for movements and non-governmental organisations)
Literature: McCully, Silenced Rivers, 281-314 (Chapter 10)
Guest speaker(s) t.b.a. – 12 November
Workshop Interdisciplinarity – 19 November
Recap and Working Session on Group Assignment – 26 November
Working Session on Group Assignment – 3 December
Group Presentations – 10 December
Group Presentations – 17 December