Sayd Randle

dreams of the new world is an original choral music work by composer Ellen Reid, commissioned by the Los Angeles Master Chorale. The piece explores the ideologies and myths that have shaped the places and people of the U.S. West since the 19th century. To develop the work, Reid, librettist Sarah LaBrie, and I carried out short-term ethnographic and archival research in L.A., Houston, and Memphis. dreams debuted at L.A.'s Disney Concert Hall in May 2018. More background on the piece is available on the project’s and the LAMC’s websites.

The Longest Straw is a feature-length document about the connections between Los Angeles and the places from which the city draws its water. Produced by Samantha Bode and Angela Jorgensen, the film is organized around Bode's 338-mile hike up the length of the L.A. Aqueduct. 

As part of my dissertation research, I hiked as part of the production for a week in June 2015. I wrote an essay about the experience - as well as the L.A. Department of Water and Power's role in shaping the landscape of Eastern California - for Sage Magazine.

Wastewater treatment plants are rich, revealing sites for anyone interested in the urban environment. I've written short and longform essays about how Southern California's sewage facilities are wrapped into ideas about futurity, technology, and the state's role in the urban environment.

In this diary-style essay, I draw on my months embedded within a small home greywater system installation company to delve into the experience of running a water-saving startup at the height of a historic drought.

Oscillations is an immersive sound and art installation developed by composer Ellen Reid. The piece draws on my archival work exploring the history of Los Angeles’s Bunker Hill neighborhood, the site of present-day Walt Disney Concert Hall. Staged outside Disney Hall in October 2018 as part of the LA Philharmonic’s 100th Season, the work was described as “transfixing” by the LA Times.

What makes water ‘local’? Among Southern California water managers, the answer isn’t as straightforward as you might imagine. I explore the complications and contradictions within this emic category for the Anthropology and Environment Society’s Engagement blog.

In this essay for Metropolitics, I explore how representations of California’s Sierra Nevada snowpack are shifting - and how these changes index rising climate change anxieties in the state’s populous lowlands.

What sort of changes might the climate changed future bring to California’s agricultural heartland? This review of Mark Arax’s The Dreamt Land (2019) explores the shifts and continuities the coming years may bring to the Central Valley. Published by the Los Angeles Review of Books.

LA’s Northeastern San Fernando Valley is a perennial floodscape. Centering the mundane disaster of inundation in these neighborhoods, this essay explores under-the-radar environmental burdens long shouldered by LA’s communities of color. Published by the Michigan Quarterly Review as part of a gorgeous themed issue on water.

This short essay, written for the Weather Matters blog , uses Paolo Bacigalupi’s novel The Water Knife to explore the dangers of fetishizing eco-friendly design in the stories we tell about the future of the desert Southwest

As we move toward a more renewables-powered grid, we're going to need more energy storage capacity. The hitch: many large-scale storage infrastructures bring huge, unevenly distributed spatial impacts - a looming environmental justice issue. This short essay for Zocalo Public Square offers a snapshot of some emerging storage conflicts and challenges.

Adapting California's diverse landscapes to our changing climate will require an immense amount of work. I argue that we need to center the question of how to value that vital labor in this review of Climate Stewardship: Taking Collective Action to Protect California (UC Press 2021) for LARB.

Moving between the silty rivers of Colombia’s La Mojana delta, PFAS-tainted groundwater in Michigan, lithium-rich salt ponds in Argentina’s Puna region, and the deserts of eastern California, this invited commentary considers how contemporary anthropologists are grappling with water’s world-making permeability. I wrote this for the Anthropology and Environment Society’s “Disputed Water Worlds” collection and strongly encourage you to check out all of its excellent contributions.

Ever encountered a wild boar in your urban neighborhood? It may seem surprising, but across the globe (including in densely settled Singapore), a growing number of people would answer “yes.” Writing for Asian Management Insights, a magazine published thrice-yearly by SMU’s Centre for Management Practice, in this essay I discuss the frictions and friendships that arise when people and pigs share these landscapes.

Lithium-ion battery arrays, pumped hydropower plants, forest carbon initiatives… what, exactly, do such high-profile projects have in common? As this short podcast episode explains, they’re all forms of resource storage that seek to address global climate change - and that also reshape local environments and political economic arrangements in the process. Also available via Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, and many other platforms.