Originally from Costa Rica, Dr. Andrea Ballestero is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Southern California and Director of the Ethnography Studio. Her book A Future History of Water (Duke 2019), examines how people create distinctions between water as a human right and water as a commodity in a world of never-ending bifurcations. She is co-editor of Experimenting with Ethnography: A Companion to Analysis and is currently writing a book that examines cultural and spatial imaginaries of the underground as a new planetary frontier. She is studying how aquifers pull our imagination downwards, reorienting us from the celestial to the subsurface. She examines how this shift potentially opens new questions about property and science. Her works can be found at https://andreaballestero.com
My first book, A Future History of Water (Duke 2019), asks how the difference between a human right and a commodity is produced in regulatory and governance spaces that purport to be open to different forms of knowledge and promote flexibility and experimentation. I have worked with regulators, policy-makers, and NGOs in Costa Rica and Brazil where I trace how technolegal devices embody moral distinctions, pose questions about the foundations of liberal capitalist societies, and help people inhabit non-linear and generative futures.
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