Timescapes of Himalayan hydropower: promises, project life cycles, and precarities

In this paper, we review the existing social science scholarship focused on hydropower development in the Himalayan region, using an interpretive lens attuned to issues of time and temporality. While the spatial politics of Himalayan hydropower are well examined in the literature, an explicit examination of temporal politics is lacking. In this paper, we present a conceptual framework organized around the heuristic of timescapes, highlighting temporal themes implicit in the existing literature. In three sections, we explore the temporal politics of anticipation that shape hydropower dreams, the intersecting temporalities and rhythms that modulate the life cycles of hydropower projects, and the ways that geological and hydrological time affect both hydropower development and broader Himalayan futures. Along the way, we pose a series of questions useful for framing future research given the significant climatic, geophysical, and sociopolitical changes underway in the Himalayan bioregion, calling for greater analytical attention to time, temporality, and temporal ethics in future studies of hydropower in the Himalayas and beyond.Austin Lord, Georgina Drew, Mabel Denzin Gerga

Meso-scale deformation and damage in thermally bonded nonwovens

This article was published in the Journal of Materials Science [© Springer Science+Business Media]. The final publication is available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10853-012-7013-yThermal bonding is the fastest and the cheapest technique for manufacturing nonwovens. Understanding mechanical behaviour of these materials, especially related to damage, can aid in design of products containing nonwoven parts. A finite element (FE) model incorporating mechanical properties related to damage such as maximum stress and strain at failure of fabric’s fibres would be a powerful design and optimisation tool. In this study, polypropylene-based thermally bonded nonwovens manufactured at optimal processing conditions were used as a model system. A damage behaviour of the nonwoven fabric is governed by its single-fibre properties, which are obtained by conducting tensile tests over a wide range of strain rates. The fibres for the tests were extracted from the nonwoven fabric in a way that a single bond point was attached at both ends of each fibre. Additionally, similar tests were performed on unprocessed fibres, which form the nonwoven. Those experiments not only provided insight into damage mechanisms of fibres in thermally bonded nonwovens but also demonstrated a significant drop in magnitudes of failure stress and respective strain in fibres due to the bonding process. A novel technique was introduced in this study to develop damage criteria based on the deformation and fracture behaviour of a single fibre in a thermally bonded nonwoven fabric. The damage behaviour of a fibrous network within the thermally bonded fabric was simulated with a FE model consisting of a number of fibres attached to two neighbouring bond points. Additionally, various arrangements of fibres’ orientation and material properties were implemented in the model to analyse the respective effects

Understanding Regulatory Cultures: The Case of Water Regulatory Reforms in India

This article uses the concept of regulatory cultures to understand the (dis)embedding of “independent” water regulation in India. It analyzes the specific case of the Maharashtra Water Resources Regulatory Authority and explores how discourses and practices (1990–2015) shaped the regulatory development in the water sector. By documenting the practices of meaning-making of “independent” regulation, the paper queries the process(es) of subnational regulatory diffusion and analyzes how water regulation is translated, negotiated, contested, and subverted as situated meanings evolve in the process. Taking an anthropological approach to studying the State and regulation, the article demonstrates how and why the State remains at the very center of the regulatory project in the water sector in India