Ryan Christopher Jones

This visual-ethnographic project in California’s Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta explores the local perceptions of water as it flows through the region. Approved in 2023 yet presently in litigation, the Delta Conveyance Project is a $20 billion infrastructure plan to divert nearly a trillion yearly gallons of additional Delta water to drier parts of California. Delta communities fear increased diversions could irreparably harm the local ecosystem, intensifying state tensions over the future of sustainable water. Using multimodal methodologies—including boat-based ethnographic photography that will move viewers through Delta waterways—I will observe and interview reclamation districts, fishers, and environmental advocates, who each have distinct relationships to local waterways. The California Water Wars narrative has been inherited through a century of political fights over water, yet my research does not accept this framing as a given. Instead, I will empirically track how local groups produce and contest multiple perceptions of Delta water. Inspired by the legal category of water as a “fugitive” resource that evades easy capture, this research offers the repurposed concept of “fugitive waters,” which will shed new light on the dynamic meanings of moving water as it flees, flows, and escapes away from the California Delta.