Katharine (Katie) Meehan

Ph.D. Candidate, Geography & Regional Development

M.Sc., Environmental Change and Management, University of Oxford, 2005
B.A., Political Science and Environmental Studies, University of Oregon, 1999

E-mail: kameehan@email.arizona.edu

Department of Geography and Regional Development
Harvill Building, Box #2
Tucson, AZ 85721
USA

Curriculum Vitae

Research

Mark Twain once observed that, "Whiskey is for drinking, water is for fighting over." I like this. Scotch seems plentiful these days, while provision of municipal water supply is a serious challenge for urban areas, especially in desert cities.

My research pulls together political economy, water resources, and social justice. I'm particularly interested in the effects of autonomous politics and non-capitalist economies on water governance and hydrologic flows in urban areas. My master's research examined decentralized water management in Guatemala, exploring the human (e.g. State-society relations) and non-human dynamics (e.g. precipitation variability) that stalled decentralization in post-war municipalities.

For my doctoral project, I am studying the institutions, infrastructures, and alternative economies formed in household water harvesting in Tijuana's informal settlements, or "colonias." Using insights from feminist and anti-essentialist theories, my work looks at the relationship between grid and off-grid water use: how wastewater reuse transforms spatial patterns of stormwater runoff, infrastructure access, and public-private reclamation efforts. I prefer using, as my advisor Paul Robbins likes to say, the "wrong methods for the right questions": such as hydrologic modeling to reveal non-capitalist economies, Q- factor analyses to gauge State formation, and ethnographic techniques to examine coastal estuarine pollution.

Apart from my dissertation, I've worked on three research projects (listed below) that broadly address questions in political ecology. These gigs range from examining the role of amenities �|such as swimming pools �|in urban growth politics; to working closely with an ecologist (Kiza Gates of Montana State University) on the emergence of invasive species networks in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem.

Project Involvement

• Research blog: http://lasfugas.blogspot.com/
• Greywater and the Grid: Analyzing Wastewater Reuse in Tijuana, Mexico.
• Invasive Networks: Angler Movement Patterns and Whirling Disease Transference in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem. With Kiza Gates, Montana State University-Bozeman.
• Amenity Water Management: The Problem of Pools. With Paul Robbins and Gary Woodard, Sustainability of semi-Arid Hydrology and Riparian Areas (SAHRA)
• Assessing Global Waters Initiatives. With Robert Varady, Udall Center for Studies in Public Policy.