RESEARCH

DISSERTATION

Land After Technology: Collective Memory and the New York City Water Supply
My first project explores the history of how people living in the rural watershed that supplies nearly all of New York City’s drinking water have reckoned with and mobilized the histories of displacement, land loss, and resource management in the Catskill region. The city constructed six large reservoirs in the area, between 1905 and 1965, inundating almost two dozen communities. In this work, I explore how the rupture and trauma of displacement have become part of the relationship between the city which depends on this watershed and the rural communities whose everyday lives have been shaped by and also enable it. Looking at regulatory practices, intergenerational agricultural knowledge, and memory practices such as scrapbooks and local histories, I argue that the meaning and impact of infrastructural and technological systems are best understood from the standpoint of the communities who have lived with them, rather than the communities which they serve. 

Drawing on theories from science and technology studies, memory studies, disaster studies, and critical infrastructure studies, I rely on both traditional historical methods as well as ethnography and oral history.
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