Watermarks: Memory and Flood Insurance

• In Event: Assembling Resilience - I

Abstract

Representing floods as a source of memory has long been an organizing theme of critical posthumanist geography that analyzes the production of resilience. This paper explores what the social studies of science can add to this analysis by examining how watermarks have been similarly experienced through data managed for flood insurance. It asks how watermarks have been drawn upon as a metaphor for the inseparability of human memory and natural history, and the conversion of money into risk. Using the example of a flood insurance scheme program discussed by the government and cash crop farmers but ultimately never realized in coastal Guyana, this paper shows how symbolism of the watermark takes on form and meaning through knowledge about resilience. It argues that flood insurance exposes that resilience is enacted not only through actuarial science but a multitude of practices including, but not limited to “brainstorming” exercises related to data analytics and the digitalization of archives.

Author

• Sarah Vaughn, University of California, Berkeley