My research program considers a range of questions related to urban ecologies, climate change responses, infrastructural transformation, multispecies entanglement, and resource politics. See below for more information on key themes, projects, and publications.
Rerouting water and adapting to climate change in Los Angeles
My first long-term ethnographic research project explores an enormous urban water system in a state of flux. Moving between shower drains, aqueducts, rain gardens, and even kitchen sinks, this work elaborates the high stakes and halting progress of efforts to climate-proof the City of LA’s waterscape. For more than a century, LA has relied on faraway water for the vast majority of its municipal supply. But climate change is making these distant sources much less dependable. To adapt, Angelenos—including city engineers, advocates at NGOs, and residents—are developing new water supplies within the space of the city. I examine the labor of replumbing LA’s sprawling water system, detailing how a desire to sustain unlimited and uninterrupted water provision for paying customers is reshaping the urban environment and its management.
Related writing
Randle, Sayd. (2021) “Battling over bathwater: Greywater technopolitics in Los Angeles.” City & Society. Link
Co-Winner of City & Society’s 2021 Best Paper Prize
Randle, Sayd. (2021) “Missing power: Nostalgia and disillusionment among Southern California water managers.” Critique of Anthropology. Link
Randle, Sayd. (2022) “Ecosystem duties, green infrastructure, and environmental injustice in Los Angeles.” American Anthropologist. Link
Honorable Mention for the Anthropology & Environment Society’s 2022 Bonnie J. McCay Junior Scholar Award
Randle, Sayd. (2025) Replumbing the City: Water Management as Climate Adaptation in Los Angeles. University of California Press. Link
Infrastructural networks and uncertain futures
In many parts of the world, conditions of water and electricity availability are mediated by extensive grids, and the dams, power plants, pipes, and wires that comprise these systems have been seen as harbingers of modernity and progress. But there is a growing recognition that the sense of promise associated with such networked infrastructures has frequently gone unfulfilled, and that the grids (whether faltering or functioning) have brought risk and harm to many landscapes and communities. Considering a range of cases and sites, I have explored these disappointments alongside the anxiously anticipated futures now shaping efforts to manage such systems.
Related writing
Randle, Sayd and Jessica Barnes. (2018) “Liquid futures: Water management systems and anticipated environments.” Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Water. Link
Randle, Sayd. (2022) “On aqueducts and anxiety: Water infrastructure, ruination, and a region-scaled Anthropocene imaginary.” GeoHumanities. Link
Chatti, Deepti and Sayd Randle. (2023) “Disrupting the grid: Encountering fire and smoke through energy infrastructures.” Environment and Society: Advances in Research. Link
Winner of the Anthropology & Environment Society’s 2024 Bonnie J. McCay Junior Scholar Award
Randle, Sayd and David Linville. (2024) “Big infrastructure and/as systemic flexibility: The Sites Reservoir story.” Journal of Political Ecology. Link
Infrastructural nature and the multispecies city
While concrete and rebar are popularly associated with the phrase “urban infrastructure,” city parks, street trees, and vegetated swales are increasingly understood by urban planners and designers to serve key infrastructural functions. My earlier writings on these assemblages focused on the challenges of developing and sustaining such green infrastructure, particularly the long-term (frequently unpaid) human labor that its maintenance entails. My newer research, funded by a grant from SMU’s Urban Institute, considers the unintended forms of flourishing that such infrastructure can support. Tracking the wild hogs who thrive in the green spaces of Singapore and Houston, this project explores the spatial politics and multispecies entanglements emerging through the cultivation of functional urban nature.
Related writing
Randle, Sayd. (2022) “Ecosystem duties, green infrastructure, and environmental injustice in Los Angeles.” American Anthropologist. Link
Heidari, Bardia, Sayd Randle, Dean Minchillo, and Fouad Jaber. (2023) “Green stormwater infrastructure: A critical review of the barriers to implementation.” Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Water. Link
Randle, Sayd. (2024) “Wild hogs in the water: Contested infrastructural ecologies of reservoir storage in Texas.” Antipode. Link
Political ecologies of storage
My interest in resource storage emerged through my work on LA’s water system, particularly the city’s ongoing efforts to develop new subterranean water stockpiles. Recognizing the growing salience of water, energy, and carbon storage to projects of climate adaptation and mitigation, I have begun to elaborate storage as an analytic that might enable collective theorization of such efforts. In the years ahead, I plan to explore these dynamics ethnographically through long-term research in urban Nepal. Considering shifts in resource storage arrangements at a range of scales, this project will examine the emergent meanings, politics, and metabolisms associated with storage in the context of rapid metropolitan development.
Related writing
Randle, Sayd. (2022) “Holding water for the city: Emergent geographies of storage and the urbanization of nature.” Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space. Link
Randle, Sayd. (2024) “Wild hogs in the water: Contested infrastructural ecologies of reservoir storage in Texas.” Antipode. Link
Randle, Sayd. (2024) “Geographies of storage.” Geography Compass. Link