Please join us for a public lecture titled “Narratives of Urban Hydrocolonialism: Mass Water Shutoffs and Public Health in Detroit” by BGSU alum and associate professor of communication at Wayne State University, Dr. Rahul Mitra. This event is free and open to the public. 

About the presentation

Between 2014 and 2020, an estimated 145,000 homes were disconnected from clean drinking water in the majority-Black city of Detroit, MI, because of unpaid bills. This not only caused severe psychological distress to affected residents but also made them more susceptible to water-borne diseases like Hepatitis and contributed to the rapid spread of COVID-19 in the city.

In this essay, Dr. Mitra argues that hydrocolonialism, an emerging framework from the humanities that has mainly been used to trace the historical actions of water-borne colonial powers, can be extended to theorize the neocolonial logics and practices underlying water affordability even in the Global North. Specifically, in U.S. cities, urban hydrocolonialism works to prioritize austerity and financial creditworthiness, commodify water as an extractive resource, and perpetuate racist tropes targeting low-income minoritized residents while ignoring their elevated health risks.

Drawing from critical ethnography between 2018-2020, Dr. Mitra focuses on the role of institutional narratives of crisis, place and agency, which distort the lived experiences and social histories of Black and Brown residents, to enact urban hydrocolonialism. Dr. Mitra will also present examples of activist counternarratives that successfully resisted hydrocolonialism and sought to rehabilitate care-centered modes of public health.