Friend and Foe: Relating Water and Housing through the Lens of Extractivism

• In Event: Permeable Housing and Intersecting Infrastructures

Abstract

This paper summarises Australian research which establishes the key reasons why government-funded Indigenous housing so quickly corrodes, prey to watery invasions and moves beyond the functional decay points within housing to explore why consistently funded and expertly attended repair and maintenance is so hard to assure. Water joins the story of why houses fall apart, and why they are neglected, at the micro-scale of watery entropy and the macro-scale of extractive settler colonialism. STS techniques enable both scales to be brought into view, revealing the infrastructures humans introduce to manage water’s circulations at subterranean, household and political economic levels. In calling on STS to help trace these affiliations, I also explore the limitations of over-reliance on science and technology accounts, including the inability to conjure the policy apparitions which haunt present day infrastructural inequalities. STS enjoined to the role of policy hauntology better explains why Indigenous housing and health remains so poor in the midst of settler colonial affluence -- an affluence which depends in turn on technologies of extraction, themselves legacies of militarily propelled science and technology.

Author

• Tess Lea, University of Sydney