Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: The post-industrial dependence on experts and its related power imbalances has engendered social movement demands for participation. Given the reliance of environmental policy on science and expert knowledge, one such key group of movements and collaborations is those that attempt to democratize environmental research and slow the environmental degradation. This paper examines the social movement and resultant participatory methods that democratize environmental knowledge. I conceptualize the democratization of knowledge as the process through which local, lay perspectives become legitimate in science and/or expert knowledge to the point that they affect political decision-making. Theorists have pointed to movement contestation of research and technology as characteristic of new social movements, but have yet to empirically study this movement tactic. The environmental movement is the classic case to contest knowledge in order to improve policy. This paper examines the movement of dam-affected people in Brazil to understand its 1) strategies, ideologies and alliances, 2) resultant research collaborations between experts and lay people, and 3) the affects of these collaborations on policy. Based on interviews with movement actors, government officials, and scientific experts, I find that this movement has been effective in constructing new environmental research that serves as an alternative to that conducted by industry proposing potential dams. This paper is therefore an examination of the processes involved therein. Such projects play a pivotal role in the achievement of movement goals. The anti-dam movement in Brazil provides an empirical instance in which to explore how movements contest and consequently shape research.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: This paper analyzes the anti-dam movement in Brazil, including its initiation, growth and current form. It argues that the anti-dam movement has constructed a new arena of communicative action to contest the construction of hydroelectric dams. The local meetings and organizing conducted by the anti-dam movement build this arena of communicative action to directly oppose governmental and corporate interests. As a result the anti-dam movement in Brazil has successfully halted the construction of many dams, including what would have been the largest dam in Latin America. It has garnered resettlement packages for previously ignored communities, and has altered discourse around dam-planning. Its instigation and success has been strongly shaped by governmental policy, institutions and connections. It has also relied heavily on an organizational form of internal cross-class alliances in the form of professionalized non-governmental organizations and grassroots groups.
This paper argues that the scientization of governmental decision-making has been used to rationalize dam-building and has hence stimulated the movement�s attempt to create new forms of communicative action. It additionally argues that these norms and their supporting governmental structures shape activism. This paper is the first assessment of one of the most important transnational social movements in the world; one that played a critical role in initiating the global anti-dam movement.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Arundhati Roy?s essay, Greater Common Good, decries the construction of the Narmada Dam in India in scathingly ironic and emotive rhetoric. The project she argued benefited a few at the expense of the poor and illiterate and the anti-dam protest was more than a fight to save the river valley, it was a question of justice in Indian democracy. However, the pro-dam lobby, whose views were represented in a formal reply by civil society activist BG Verghese, dismissed her careful scholarship and powerful prose as mere Poetic Licence - an anti-development diatribe not based on evidence. Ironic tropes, critics argue, render the text open to polysemic readings. However, the Narmada dam debate reveals that there is preferred reading of the text and a deliberate misreading of the author?s intent that is hard to explain as mere effect of the textual characteristics of irony as a rhetorical trope. The paper argues that the current theories of irony only clarify why ironic texts are open to multiple interpretations. They are unable to explain the misreading or preferred readings of text as they do not take into account the evidence of reception of the text or pay adequate heed to the surrounding context. This paper calls for a more reader-centered approach to interpretation of ironic text which takes into consideration a formal evidence of reception and the context of communication.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: This paper investigates the conditions under which participatory social movements can undermine democratic politics by using the example of the Narmada dam movement in the Indian state of Gujarat. Through an analysis of legislative debates, folk literature, NGO activities, interviews, newspapers and magazine reports from the 1960s to the present, I trace the political consensus that emerged from the contentious debates surrounding the dam on the Narmada River. I show how the pro-dam mobilizations forged alliances across the state and civil society in favor of the dam as the “lifeline of Gujarat”. Simultaneously, these mobilizations kindled a Gujarati sub-regionalism by defining those opposed to the dam as the “enemies of Gujarat.” I argue that the movement used the avenues made available by democracy to redefine the framework of public debate in ways that suppressed dissent and alternative political positions. Finally, I examine how this consensus influenced politics far beyond the issue of the dam itself. I hope to provoke a critical examination of the theory and practice of social movements and challenge the positive relationship often assumed to exist between democracy and social movements more generally.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: For centuries the Elwha River and its fish were integral to the livelihoods and culture of the Lower Elwha Klallam people. Since the damming of the Elwha River in 1910, the LEK have struggled with dwindling fish populations and a changing riverine environment. This paper is intended to disentangle some of the historical complexity that has created the environmental inequality for the LEK people. This study aims to extend the literature on the hybridity of the physical and the social by examining an empirical case in which groups within a society differentially organize around nature. Using closure theory, this paper describes the historic structuring of the Lower Elwha Klallam social position with respect to the environment throughout the period from 1855 to 1937.
The principal form of closure was found to be a paired system based on private property and apartheid, or rather the separateness of Indian people from the rest of American society. The structural arrangements of closure facilitated the monopolization of the Elwha River, in which a few non-Indian property holders gained legal and physical control of the river, its water, and its contents. Despite Klallam resistance, the construction of the dam prohibited Kallam engagement in a self-directed form of economy. The case of the Elwha River suggests that the transformation of the natural world is both a product of and stimulus for social transformation and that the nature of the physical-social nexus may be transformed through a power-laden process of exclusion and domination.