Replacing questions of scale with concerns about distance, Ballestero’s talk asks how people make sense of their planetary condition by thinking geologically. She explores the role that movement — movement of an aquifer and movement as analytic — plays as people navigate the force-fields of their daily lives an already changed planet. Bringing together the work of geologists, local residents, and artists, Ballestero proposes choreographic thinking as a way of changing the terms of engagement in the midst of an increasingly authoritarian and populist planetary climate.
Andrea Ballestero is an anthropologist interested in political and legal anthropology, STS, and social studies of finance and economics. She is a faculty member in the Anthropology Department at USC. Her work looks at the unexpected ethical and technical entanglements through which experts understand water in Latin America. She is particularly interested in spaces where the law, economics and techno-science are so fused that they appear as one another. Her first book, A Future History of Water (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. She has worked with regulators, policy-makers, and NGOs in Costa Rica and Brazil where she traces how techno-legal devices embody moral distinctions, pose questions about the foundations of liberal capitalist societies, and help people inhabit non-linear and generative futures.
2024
