Profile

My expertise lies in infrastructural geography, water policy and governance, informal urban development, household water insecurity, transdisciplinary knowledge regimes, and the politics of environmental knowledge and technology, especially at the science-policy interface. I work at the cusp of urban political ecology and science and technology studies (STS), and I draw on feminist theory (including feminist political economy and science studies) to frame my research in Latin America.

I have two parallel lines of research. Building on my theory of tool-power, my current book project examines household water insecurity in Mexico City and how grassroots organizations have emerged to create new kinds of infrastructural models of people, water, and the city. Based on a five-year ethnographic study of rainwater harvesting innovation, I explore how rainwater practitioners in Mexico City are replumbing the city (and relations between citizens and the state) in potentially more equitable, resilient, and sustainable ways. This project builds on my broader interests in the legal, sociotechnical, and spatial planning challenges associated with institutionalizing new forms of water supply in cities (such as rain or recycled wastewater). Past dissertation research, set in the Mexican border city of Tijuana, traced why and how people create 'water' by recycling household greywater (a type of 'waste'), and how these informal technologies produce diverse economies, institutions, and hydrologic flows.

Thanks to recent collaborations across the Americas, I have developed a second area of expertise in the politics of environmental knowledge integration and mobilization at the science/policy interface. Supported by a multi-year Fulbright NEXUS grant with scholars from Canada, Latin America and the Caribbean, we explored the geopolitics of transdisciplinary knowledge mobilization across the hemisphere: including new modes of stakeholder engagement in transdisciplinary sutainability research, how 'local knowledge' is unevenly understood in climate adaptation studies, and the ontological and political challenges of integrating knowledge in environmental science.

In 2017, I launched a new NSF-sponsored research project on Knowledge Integration that explores how experts integrate knowledge "from microbes to landscapes" and across disciplinary cultures in the Brazilian Amazon, a place of intense scientific collaboration and longstanding geopolitical unease regarding issues of knowledge production and resource extraction. For more information and project updates on our blog, see our website here.

Starting in January 2019, I will move to a new faculty position in Geography at King's College London. I will no longer be taking on new graduate student advisees at Oregon. If you are a prospective graduate student and interested in working with me, please take a close look at KCL Geography and email me a CV and brief description of your thesis/dissertation research topic to katharine.meehan@kcl.ac.uk. Thanks!