Associate Professor, The University of Southern California
Biography
Dr Andrea Ballestero is Associate Professor of Anthropology and Director of the Ethnography Studio at the University of Southern California. Her first book A Future History of Water (Duke 2019) examines how people create endless bifurcations as they materialize the idea that a human right to water differs radically from its commodification. Based on ethnographic work conducted in Costa Rica and Brazil, the book examines how the technical is imbued with the ethical as people attempt to change the future. She is also 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.
Selected publications
Under the Surface (Limn 2025)
Persistence of Long Facts (Tapuya 2024)
Los Hechos Nunca Andan Solos (Tapuya 2024)
Casual Planetarities (Environmental Humanities 2023)
Trusts at the Financial Frontier (Journal of Cultural Economy 2023)
