Just One Rain Away: The Ethnography of River-City Flood Control

Wary cities like Winnipeg continue to depend on systems and specifications that will soon be out of date, as rivers have impulses that defy many of the basic human assumptions underpinning sophisticated technologies. This is the river-city expression of climate change. In Just One Rain Away, Stephanie Kane shows how geoscience, engineering, and law converge to affect flood control in Winnipeg, questioning technicalities produced and maintained in tandem with settler folkways at the expense of Indigenous nations' plural legal cultures. Through storytelling and environmental analytics, the book provides a starting point for cross-cultural discussions about how expert knowledge and practice should inform egalitarian decision-making about flood control and decolonize current ways of thinking, being, and becoming with rivers.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 336 pages
Publication date: 15 December 2022
Publisher: McGill-Queen's University Press

Not long ago, it appeared that flood control experts were on the verge of mastering the unruly flows cascading towards Hudson Bay and the Prairie city of Winnipeg. However, as more intense and out-of-sync flood events occur, wary cities like Winnipeg continue to rely on systems and specifications that will soon become outdated. Rivers possess impulses that defy many of the fundamental human assumptions underlying otherwise sophisticated technologies. This is the river-city manifestation of climate change.

In "Just One Rain Away," Stephanie Kane explores how geoscience, engineering, and law converge to shape flood control in Winnipeg. She raises critical questions about the technicalities produced and maintained in tandem with settler folkways, at the expense of the diverse legal cultures of Indigenous nations. The dynamics of this experimental ethnography are both familiar and strange: here, many of the starring actors are not human. Ice and water, materializing as bodies, elements, and digital signals, interact with diatoms, diversions, sensors, sandbags, satellites, and more, looping theories about glacial erratics and feminist science studies into scenes from neighborhood parks, conferences, survey maps, plays, archival photos, a novel, an emergency press conference, LiDAR images, and a lab experiment in a bathtub.

Through storytelling and environmental analytics, "Just One Rain Away" serves as a valuable starting point for cross-cultural discussions about how expert knowledge and practice should inform egalitarian decision-making about flood control and, more broadly, decolonize current ways of thinking, being, and becoming with rivers.

Weight: 504g
Dimension: 153 x 230 x 24 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9780228014287