Communities in many parts of the world, especially in developing countries, face obstacles in supplying continuous water to household consumers. Authorities often cite water scarcity as the cause, but we demonstrate that environmental constraints constitute only one aspect of a multi-dimensional problem. By asking what causes intermittent domestic water supply, this literature review (129 articles) identifies 47 conditions of intermittent systems and the causal-consequential pathways between them that can reinforce intermittency. These pathways span several disciplines including engineering, government administration and anthropology, and when viewed together they (1) emphasize the human drivers of intermittency; (2) suggest generalized interventions; and (3) reveal a gap in the literature in terms of meaningful categorizations of the reliability of intermittent supplies. Based on the reliability of consumers' water access, we propose three categories of intermittency-predictable, irregular, and unreliable-to facilitate comparisons between case studies and transfers of solutions.
This article tracks contests of representation among the Palestinian Authority (PA), the U.S. news media, and the Palestinian public regarding the funeral of PA President Yasser Arafat and subsequent presidential elections. It is popularly assumed that governments primarily represent by gathering people and implementing actions in their names, whereas media represent by depicting the world. Latour has called for “object‐oriented democracies” that reintegrate gathering and depiction in ways that eschew formal structures of political legitimation, which have so often been abused. This enables recognition of emergently democratic forms. However, even in these provisional assemblies, established institutions of legitimating representation, like states and elite media institutions, continue to exert authority. This demands an ethnographic examination of connections among the state, the press, and the public. Palestinian officials and the public alike identify the U.S. media as influential conduits to powerful outsiders. Thus, Palestinian officials may use the Western press as an executive force, to encourage Palestinians to perform nationhood in an orderly manner. Palestinians may determine that neither the U.S. media nor the PA adequately represent them, and thus carry out political actions according to local political traditions. U.S. media depicted popular forms of gathering in the street at Arafat's funeral as chaotic, whereas they depicted voting, about which some Palestinians had important reservations, as a progressive form of gathering. As officials and journalists do their representational work, the ostensible subjects of representation, the public, often undertake their own projects of gathering and depicting, but these are reincorporated into—and transformed by—authorized representational institutions.
Study of the production process of news about Palestinians rather than simply its final forms reveals the extent to which mainstream news is a cultural product not only of US society and western journalism’s professional norms, but of Palestinian society as well. Palestinian journalists working for international news contribute essential labor to the final product of international news. They serve as cultural and geographical guides for foreign correspondents. They are photojournalists and reporters on the scene covering both everyday political news and dangerous crises. Much of their work demands embodied skills acquired within Palestinian society under occupation. Yet, perhaps because journalism is generally thought of as intellectual work, and also because of the intensely local nature of these journalistic skills, Palestinian journalists’ contributions - which generally relate to the facilitation of knowledge production, rather than to the formulation of editorial positions - are rarely recognized in publication or in discussions of journalism
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