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xi acknowledgments Qualitative research is impossible unless a great number of busy people take time away from their primary activities to talk. I am thus very grateful both to the short course students who filled out my surveys and put up with having one of their fellow participants observe them and to the people who took the time to talk with me about their restoration work during my various rounds of interviews (interview subjects are listed by name in the appendix). Of the latter group, there are a few who were particularly generous, speaking with me multiple times to help me get a better grasp on stream restoration history, policy, practice, and science. I am especially grateful to Martin Doyle, Craig Fischenich, Matt Kondolf, Greg Koonce, Jim MacBroom, Dale Miller, Dave Rosgen, Doug Shields, and Jim Wilcox. A startling number of people have read the dissertation on which this book is based, and dog-eared copies have been spotted everywhere from seminar rooms to conference bars. I have received more than 130 comments, many from people unfamiliar to me. These letters and e-mails were very helpful both in confirming my analysis of the Rosgen Wars and in pointing out which parts of the initial manuscript worked and which did not. My thanks to all of you who took the time to write to me. Academic labor may be largely solitary, but academic thinking is not. The arguments that follow were honed in conversation with a number of audiences , including the Restoration Ecology Program at Umeå University and the Geography Departments at the University of Illinois, University of Kentucky, Miami University of Ohio, University of Uppsala, and West Virginia University. Phillip Mirowski and Sam Randalls have been both interlocutors and partners in crime, helping to expand and deepen my thinking about neoliberalism and the university. At Indiana University, my fellow Sawyer Seminar organizers and participants Eric Deibel, Ilana Gershon, Tom Gieryn, Eric Harvey, Eden Medina, Elizabeth Nelson, Jutta Schickore, and Kalpana Shankar have done much to push my thinking on the science and technology studies front. I also appreciate Micol Siegel’s consistent willingness to question the basic premises everyone else in the room took for granted. xii • acknowledgments To say that the geomorphology community at the University of California at Berkeley was instrumental to this project is to understate. I could not have done this research if Laurel Collins, Kurt Cuffey, Bill Dietrich, and Matt Kondolf had not been willing to take in a stray social scientist and feed her on G. K. Gilbert, Reds Wolman, Thomas Dunne, and the broader fluvial geomorphology canon. Their intellectual openness and generosity is a gift for which I am profoundly grateful. This project also builds on the conversations, arguments, and suggestions of Joe Bryan, Jason Delborne, Martin Doyle, Mike Dwyer, Ben Gardner, Julie Guthman, Charles Lave, Jean Lave (who provided incredible feedback on multiple drafts), Tom Medvetz, Phil Mirowski, Gwen Ottinger, Sam Randalls, Morgan Robertson, Sara Shostak, Jason Strange, and my fantastic graduate school cohort: Andy Bliss, Jennifer Casolo, Wendy Cheng, Rita Gaber, Shiloh Krupar, Jason Moore, and Madeline Solomon (and our honorary cohort member , Diana Gildea). In addition, Becky Mansfield and Matt Wilson gave me a serious advice/pep talk at the 2010 Crit Mini, a pivotal intervention in the intellectual development of this book. I was blessed with a really formidable dissertation committee. Michael Burawoy pushed me to think more carefully about the mechanisms of Rosgen’s success, to read Bourdieu’s work on fields, and to consider more critically what Bourdieu says about conflict. Kurt Cuffey was remarkably willing to engage seriously with social science research and very patient in explaining what to him must have seemed very basic aspects of natural science practice. In addition to providing very thoughtful feedback about the politics of ecological restoration, Nathan Sayre was a crucial source of consistent and enthusiastic support. I am especially grateful to Michael Watts, my dissertation advisor, one of the most incisive readers I have ever had the good fortune to encounter. Derek Krissoff at the University of Georgia Press was a real pleasure to work with even when I wasn’t: consistently responsive, clear, helpful, and patient in the face of unreasonable authorial stubbornness. My thanks also to John Joerschke, John McLeod, Beth Snead, and the press’s graphics staff for turning my manuscript into a Real Book. Copyediting by Mary Wells smoothed out the bumps in the text, and indexing by Peter Brigaitis and Marie Nuchols...

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