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The metering of individual groundwater use has become a common feature of recent interventions in groundwater governance in many parts of the world, though its actual implementation has been largely unsuccessful (Molle and Closas, 2021). Such metering efforts aim to curb groundwater over-extraction by quantifying – usually for the first time ever – who is pumping groundwater, how much, when, and where. This analysis takes a step back from these management interventions and asks how we got here. How did groundwater pumping become such a 'black box' and individual metering become the exception? And what are the consequences of this data gap? This paper explores these questions in the western United States where the close accounting of surface water diversions makes for a useful foil to largely unquantified individual groundwater pumping. I synthesise biophysical, political economic, and epistemic aspects of groundwater development to examine groundwater pumping’s un-quantification and I argue that attention must be paid to all three of these categories if we are to understand why groundwater metering is not more prevalent. I elaborate on these three dimensions – groundwater materiality, knowledge production, and power/profit – as I trace how groundwater’s un-metering has been produced, widened and maintained in the region over the last 140-plus years.

In this article we examine an increasingly popular form of water activism – the source-to-sea river journey and its associated narrative – in order to understand its proliferation and implications for water discourse. We focus on source-to-sea journeys on the Colorado River because of the robust dataset that this river provides. On the Colorado, we find that, in addition to producing a compelling adventure tale, the source-to-sea journey has evolved to become an unofficial methodology for assessing the cumulative environmental impacts of human development on the river. This bootstrapped methodology challenges the epistemological status quo in the Colorado River Basin by establishing an alternative way of knowing the river and a new type of river expert. It does this by repositioning the observational scale at which the river is known: downscaling the resolution of environmental knowledge production to the scale of the individual body, while also upscaling it in extent to the scale of the full river basin. We discuss the implications of these journeys and narratives for water discourse, with an emphasis on what they render visible and what they leave invisible.

As groundwater use has surged globally and computing power has grown, groundwater modeling has become a regular feature of subsurface-oriented governance. Our improved ability to “see” underground with models has not, however, generated epistemic consensus on the inner workings of subsurface systems. Here, I ask how and why that is the case. I pursue this line of inquiry in the context of groundwater governance in the American West. Specifically, I trace a decade of groundwater modeling at the heart of a protracted and legally influential groundwater dispute in the state of Colorado to show how models served as mathematical spaces for competing subsurface stakeholders to test and contest opposing visions of groundwater flows, rights, and responsibilities. Drawing from the Science & Technology Studies literature on global climate modeling, I argue that groundwater models are more than simulations of subsurface systems; they are tools of “world building” that embed, enact, and also circumscribe subsurface politics.

This paper grapples with the challenges posed to critical geography educators by STEMification, or the enshrinement of market-oriented forms of science and technology education as the normative ideal for education in general. In both reactionary and progressive contexts, STEMification decontextualizes scientific and technological activity and deepens existing hierarchies of knowledge based on quantification, perceived scientific rigour, commercialisation, and employability. Critical geographical knowledges often incur misrecognition, dismissal, and in some cases, outright prohibition under such conditions. Offering strategies for navigating and contesting STEMification, this paper draws on collective auto-methods, analysing narrative vignettes from our pedagogical practices as critical geography educators. We offer the notion of seeking leverage in the face of STEMification: protecting ourselves and seeking traction within our institutions by translating our goals into familiar or sanctioned forms, while using those forms to alternative ends. To that end, we highlight seven pedagogical strategies: (1) meeting students where they are, (2) using applied examples, (3) grappling with the limits of problem-based learning, (4) disalienating students from assessment, (5) integrating critique with alternatives, (6) anticipating both resistance to and desire for critical content from students and colleagues, and (7) recognising the limits of institutional environments.