Andrea Ballestero - Aquifers: ethnography and responsibility at the edges of a concept

Imagining what life will become in the near future, people in Costa Rica are coming together to take responsibility for underground water worlds. As they decipher water under the surface, they oscillate between two concepts: groundwater and aquifers. Groundwater efficiently conveys a sense of water as a fungible unit that can be exchanged, banked, or spent. In contrast, the figure of the aquifer activates a grounded concept whereby land, liquid, and history are inseparable. In this talk, I query how people move from groundwater to aquifers, and sometimes back. I ask what are the stakes of doing so, and what kind of responsibility for subterranean water worlds is possible in those movements? More broadly, I examine what living at the edge of a concept entails for citizens and scientists who work to shift the trajectories of the present. Conceptually, I ask how people mark the edges of a concept and assert the different political and
ethical orientations they enable.

Dr. Andrea Ballestero is Associate Professor of Anthropology and Director of the Ethnography Studio at the University of Southern California. Her book A Future History of Water (Duke 2019) examines how people engage with the world as it is, but differently and do so by creating endless bifurcations. In Costa Rica and Brazil, where the ethnography is located, bifurcations are means to create a difference between water as a human right and water as a commodity as material and political projects. She is co-editor of Experimenting with Ethnography: A Companion to Analysis (2021), a collection of
essays and protocols to inspire creative analytic ethnographic work. Currently, Dr. Ballestero is writing a book that explores cultural imaginaries of the underground as a new planetary frontier. In recent publications she has explored aquifers as financial frontiers, practices of touching with light through GIS technologies, physical models as hydro-geo-social choreographies of responsibility, and the concept of casual planetarities. Her scholarship is located at the intersection of feminist STS, legal anthropology, and social studies of finance and has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, the Wenner Gren Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, and the Fulbright program. Her works can be found at https://andreaballestero.com