LangeMemo32

The book, like de Lorris and de Meun’s //Romance of the Rose// and the hydrologic cycle, is roughly symmetrical. After an introduction and a conventional chapter on history, I proceed to a general social theoretical chapter laying the approach to the political economy of science developed in the book. The next chapter offers an overview of the institutional framework in which contemporary hydrology is produced. The fifth chapter covers hydrological practice, the sixth shows how that practice is institutionally bound, shaped, and selected, and the seventh shows how political economic forces interact with those practices and institutions. The eight chapter retells the history of hydrology, but this time using the general analytic framework of the book, moving between changes in practice, institutions, and economies. The final chapter is a brooding yet passionate vision for how hydrology given its social location, can contribute to ending the natural, political, and economic crises of our age. Besides its aesthetic and analogical value, the book’s structure should contribute to my argument that analysts of science must move freely and integrally between different levels of analysis.

1. Introduction: Hydrological Crises Discusses the water crisis and the scientific crisis in hydrology. 2. The History of Hydrology Offers a basic history of the emergence of hydrology in Renaissance Italy and its development in France, the Low Countries, Britain, and North America. Discusses the relationship between hydrology and civil engineering. Shows how hydrology became a global science in the 1950s and 60s. 3. Political Economy and Scientific Change Develops a general social theory of scientific change wherein the relationship between a scientific field, other social fields, and the field of power is constitutive of scientific practices and knowledge production. 4. Clearing the Deck: Hydrological Predicaments of the Early 21st Century Gives an institutional account of hydrology since the 1990s, focusing on the decline (or possibly changing nature) of large dam projects caused a crisis in the science while the water crisis, and ecological problems more generally offered a new trajectory for hydrological knowledge 5. The Field in the Field: Hydrology as Practice An in depth discussion of hydrological practice in a extremely straightforward way, very much in the tradition of lab ethnography. 6. The Fora and Fauna: Hydrology and Institutions Develops upon the previous chapter by showing the relationship between competing hydrological practices and competing social institutions, with a particular emphasis on the world water forum and the environmental movement. 7. Political Economies of Hydrological Knowledge Shows how the insitituions in the previous chapter are related to global political economic social structures. 8. The Hydrology of History Rehashes the second chapter, but this time showing how each change in hydrological practices was concomitant with institutional and political economy change. 8. Conclusion: Critique of Pure Hydrology