A Ballestero
Biographic Data
| ID | 66039 |
|---|---|
| NAME | A Ballestero |
| GIVEN NAMES | A |
| FAMILY NAME | Ballestero |
| SIGNATURE | BALLESTERO A |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Southern California |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-7692-0514 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 21 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 296 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 21 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2011 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 6 |
Planetaridades Casuais: Coreografias, Ressonância e a Presença Geológica de Pessoas e Aquíferos
Consciência planetária tem se tornado sinônimo da consciência de eventos temporais, geográficos e geológicos de larga escala. Dadas as multiplicidades e instabilidades escalares da vida na terra, conceitos como planetaridade, Antropoceno, e mesmo global, têm fornecido alívio analítico. Elas nomeiam aquilo que é difícil de objetificar: a vastidão geográfica e histórica da presença geológica. No entanto, tais conceitos são devedores de hábitos de c…
Retooling: A Model of Sociotechnical Change for Turbulent Times
Retooling is a ubiquitous practice that mobilizes innovation, maintenance, and repair to address sociotechnical change in times when transformations seem difficult to accomplish. Retooling entails an intentional reorientation of purpose, foregrounds the nonlinear trajectories of technological and scientific shifts, and focuses our attention on the meso level of organizational and collective life. This paper offers a theorization of retooling grou…
Los hechos nunca andan solos: The future of facts in Latin America
The persistence of long facts: Truth and consequence in Costa Rica's aquifers
At the center of decades-long water conflicts in northwest Costa Rica, a particular fact has had a contentious status: whether the aquifers supplying the area hold sufficient water for collective life. I refer to this as the sufficiency fact, which has been established, debunked, and reestablished multiple times. To understand this peculiar dynamic, I zoom into discussions among community and business representatives about the future of these aqu…
Casual Planetarities
Planetary awareness has become synonymous with awareness of large-scale temporal, geographic, and geologic events. Given the scalar multiplicities and instabilities of life on earth, concepts such as planetarity, the Anthropocene, and even the global have provided analytic reprieve. They name that which is difficult to objectify: the geographic and historical vastness of geological presence. But those concepts grow from knowledge habits inherited…
Afterword: Trust: Too much, too little, never just enough
This afterword explores trust as a troubled and turbulent social relation that takes exuberant social forms and often operates as a contested ideology. It highlights how trust-seeking technologies yield unexpected effects, such as forms of sociality without social life, hyper-awareness of geographic context as a means for effective surveillance, a displacement of intimate arts of diplomacy in favour of resilience and distance, uncomfortable relat…
What is a financial frontier
Trusts at the financial frontier: The Flickering Forms of Property, Water, and Governance
Financialization is often understood as an expansive, spreading wave, coming from an energetic, global center of finance and creating new financial frontiers at its edges. Instead of presuming this expansive wave, I show how financial frontiers are flickering arrangements. Rather than spreading continuously, financial frontiers come into being, go dormant, and reignite with intensity. This temporal dynamic becomes apparent when we trace the speci…
Devices: A location for feminist analytics and praxis
This article offers the device as a methodological tool and concrete space for feminist praxis that can challenge the order of a world that is patriarchal, racist, and organized around capital extraction. Material or immaterial in form, a device is a tool through which different actors ground, produce, and concretize technological, legal, scientific, and political work. Many objects can become devices when pragmatically activated toward a particu…
The Re-Combinatory Nature of Property within Racial Regimes of Ownership
At a time when enduring and entrenched structures of racial inequality and oppression have become public objects of concern in Euro-America, it is easy to feel as if those historical legacies and structural forces are too powerful to be challenged. And yet, it is precisely at this kind of historical moment that it is crucial to not only diagnose existing structures, but also identify the specific legal and institutional mechanisms through which t…
A Future History of Water
Focusing on Costa Rica and Brazil, Andrea Ballestero examines the legal, political, economic, and bureaucratic history of water in the context of the efforts to classify it as a human right, showing how seemingly small scale devices such as formulas and lists play large role in determining water's status
Touching with Light, or, How Texture Recasts the Sensing of Underground Water
This paper is an ethnographic examination of the early social life of a project to map Costa Rica's aquifers using LandSat imagery and a specialized algorithm. The project aims to make subterranean formations accessible for public agencies mediating recent environmental conflicts over underground water, which have been diagnosed as the country's first "water war." I analyze the presentation to the public of this project and the technology it uses…
Beyond mystery: Putting algorithmic accountability in context
Critical algorithm scholarship has demonstrated the difficulties of attributing accountability for the actions and effects of algorithmic systems. In this commentary, we argue that we cannot stop at denouncing the lack of accountability for algorithms and their effects but must engage the broader systems and distributed agencies that algorithmic systems exist within; including standards, regulations, technologies, and social relations. To this en…
The Anthropology of Water
The anthropology of water is a self-declared relational field that attempts to transcend nature/culture distinctions by attending to the fact that the social and ecological aspects of water are separated only by convention. Despite its recent coming of age, the anthropology of water is incredibly expansive. It attends to molecular, embodied, ecosystemic, and planetary issues. I provide an overview of that breadth in four thematic clusters: (in)su…
Success through Failure: Translation, Temporal Tricks, and Numeric Concept-Work
Transparency
Transparency is a quality that renders an actor, object, or social relation knowable, revealing the process by which it comes into being without affecting its character. For anthropologists, the idea of transparency is in constant tension with obscurity and secrecy. Across the corporate, governmental, and nongovernmental contexts where it is promoted, transparency unleashes unexpected social effects, often occluding more than it discloses. Transp…
New ontologies? Reflections on some recent ‘turns’ in STS, anthropology and philosophy
This paper discusses the recent emergence of ontological approaches in science and technology studies (STS), anthropology and philosophy. Although it is common to hear of a turn, or turn, to ontology, more than one line of intellectual development is at stake. In reality, we are witness to a plural set of partly overlapping, partly divergent, turns
Capacity as Aggregation: Promises, Water and a Form of Collective Care in Northeast Brazil
As the twenty-first century gets underway, people have been experimenting with many forms of political organization. In Northeast Brazil, that experimental spirit led to the creation of the Water Pact, a process involving more than eight thousand participants through a series of public promise-making rituals in which they made pledges to care for water, attending to the specificities of their own context. The Pact gathered those promises into a m…
Paradoxical Infrastructures: Ruins, Retrofit, and Risk
In recent years, a dramatic increase in the study of infrastructure has occurred in the social sciences and humanities, following upon foundational work in the physical sciences, architecture, planning, information science, and engineering. This article, authored by a multidisciplinary group of scholars, probes the generative potential of infrastructure at this historical juncture. Accounting for the conceptual and material capacities of infrastr…
The ethics of a formula: Calculating a financial-humanitarian price for water
When Costa Rican regulators set water rates, they effectively transform the human right to water into a price. I propose the notion of a "calculation grammar" to grasp the inventive patterns and vibrant social engagements that fuse the ethical investments, ontological assumptions, and quantified expressions involved in this process. This grammar governs the relative weights and proportions of the elements in numeric propositions, giving them dist…
Gardening the World: Agency, Identity, and the Ownership of Water by Veronica Strang
How does one tell the story of water in Australia?That is the question that Veronica Strang posed to herself in the design and imagining of her latest book.The question is ambitious given water's slippery and multiple connections through material-semiotic worlds.For that reason, setting this goal for a project is in and of itself commendable.In the book, Strang juxtaposes two watersheds and shows the differences and interconnections in the trajec…
Paradoxical Infrastructures: Ruins, Retrofit, and Risk
In recent years, a dramatic increase in the study of infrastructure has occurred in the social sciences and humanities, following upon foundational work in the physical sciences, architecture, planning, information science, and engineering. This article, authored by a multidisciplinary group of scholars, probes the generative potential of infrastructure at this historical juncture. Accounting for the conceptual and material capacities of infrastr…
The Anthropology of Water
The anthropology of water is a self-declared relational field that attempts to transcend nature/culture distinctions by attending to the fact that the social and ecological aspects of water are separated only by convention. Despite its recent coming of age, the anthropology of water is incredibly expansive. It attends to molecular, embodied, ecosystemic, and planetary issues. I provide an overview of that breadth in four thematic clusters: (in)su…
The ethics of a formula: Calculating a financial-humanitarian price for water
When Costa Rican regulators set water rates, they effectively transform the human right to water into a price. I propose the notion of a "calculation grammar" to grasp the inventive patterns and vibrant social engagements that fuse the ethical investments, ontological assumptions, and quantified expressions involved in this process. This grammar governs the relative weights and proportions of the elements in numeric propositions, giving them dist…
Touching with Light, or, How Texture Recasts the Sensing of Underground Water
This paper is an ethnographic examination of the early social life of a project to map Costa Rica's aquifers using LandSat imagery and a specialized algorithm. The project aims to make subterranean formations accessible for public agencies mediating recent environmental conflicts over underground water, which have been diagnosed as the country's first "water war." I analyze the presentation to the public of this project and the technology it uses…
What is a financial frontier
Casual Planetarities
Planetary awareness has become synonymous with awareness of large-scale temporal, geographic, and geologic events. Given the scalar multiplicities and instabilities of life on earth, concepts such as planetarity, the Anthropocene, and even the global have provided analytic reprieve. They name that which is difficult to objectify: the geographic and historical vastness of geological presence. But those concepts grow from knowledge habits inherited…
Beyond mystery: Putting algorithmic accountability in context
Critical algorithm scholarship has demonstrated the difficulties of attributing accountability for the actions and effects of algorithmic systems. In this commentary, we argue that we cannot stop at denouncing the lack of accountability for algorithms and their effects but must engage the broader systems and distributed agencies that algorithmic systems exist within; including standards, regulations, technologies, and social relations. To this en…
Capacity as Aggregation: Promises, Water and a Form of Collective Care in Northeast Brazil
As the twenty-first century gets underway, people have been experimenting with many forms of political organization. In Northeast Brazil, that experimental spirit led to the creation of the Water Pact, a process involving more than eight thousand participants through a series of public promise-making rituals in which they made pledges to care for water, attending to the specificities of their own context. The Pact gathered those promises into a m…
Los hechos nunca andan solos: The future of facts in Latin America
Trusts at the financial frontier: The Flickering Forms of Property, Water, and Governance
Financialization is often understood as an expansive, spreading wave, coming from an energetic, global center of finance and creating new financial frontiers at its edges. Instead of presuming this expansive wave, I show how financial frontiers are flickering arrangements. Rather than spreading continuously, financial frontiers come into being, go dormant, and reignite with intensity. This temporal dynamic becomes apparent when we trace the speci…
Afterword: Trust: Too much, too little, never just enough
This afterword explores trust as a troubled and turbulent social relation that takes exuberant social forms and often operates as a contested ideology. It highlights how trust-seeking technologies yield unexpected effects, such as forms of sociality without social life, hyper-awareness of geographic context as a means for effective surveillance, a displacement of intimate arts of diplomacy in favour of resilience and distance, uncomfortable relat…
Success through Failure: Translation, Temporal Tricks, and Numeric Concept-Work
Gardening the World: Agency, Identity, and the Ownership of Water by Veronica Strang
How does one tell the story of water in Australia?That is the question that Veronica Strang posed to herself in the design and imagining of her latest book.The question is ambitious given water's slippery and multiple connections through material-semiotic worlds.For that reason, setting this goal for a project is in and of itself commendable.In the book, Strang juxtaposes two watersheds and shows the differences and interconnections in the trajec…
The ethics of a formula: Calculating a financial-humanitarian price for water
When Costa Rican regulators set water rates, they effectively transform the human right to water into a price. I propose the notion of a "calculation grammar" to grasp the inventive patterns and vibrant social engagements that fuse the ethical investments, ontological assumptions, and quantified expressions involved in this process. This grammar governs the relative weights and proportions of the elements in numeric propositions, giving them dist…
Paradoxical Infrastructures: Ruins, Retrofit, and Risk
In recent years, a dramatic increase in the study of infrastructure has occurred in the social sciences and humanities, following upon foundational work in the physical sciences, architecture, planning, information science, and engineering. This article, authored by a multidisciplinary group of scholars, probes the generative potential of infrastructure at this historical juncture. Accounting for the conceptual and material capacities of infrastr…
New ontologies? Reflections on some recent ‘turns’ in STS, anthropology and philosophy
This paper discusses the recent emergence of ontological approaches in science and technology studies (STS), anthropology and philosophy. Although it is common to hear of a turn, or turn, to ontology, more than one line of intellectual development is at stake. In reality, we are witness to a plural set of partly overlapping, partly divergent, turns
Capacity as Aggregation: Promises, Water and a Form of Collective Care in Northeast Brazil
As the twenty-first century gets underway, people have been experimenting with many forms of political organization. In Northeast Brazil, that experimental spirit led to the creation of the Water Pact, a process involving more than eight thousand participants through a series of public promise-making rituals in which they made pledges to care for water, attending to the specificities of their own context. The Pact gathered those promises into a m…
Transparency
Transparency is a quality that renders an actor, object, or social relation knowable, revealing the process by which it comes into being without affecting its character. For anthropologists, the idea of transparency is in constant tension with obscurity and secrecy. Across the corporate, governmental, and nongovernmental contexts where it is promoted, transparency unleashes unexpected social effects, often occluding more than it discloses. Transp…
A Future History of Water
Focusing on Costa Rica and Brazil, Andrea Ballestero examines the legal, political, economic, and bureaucratic history of water in the context of the efforts to classify it as a human right, showing how seemingly small scale devices such as formulas and lists play large role in determining water's status
Touching with Light, or, How Texture Recasts the Sensing of Underground Water
This paper is an ethnographic examination of the early social life of a project to map Costa Rica's aquifers using LandSat imagery and a specialized algorithm. The project aims to make subterranean formations accessible for public agencies mediating recent environmental conflicts over underground water, which have been diagnosed as the country's first "water war." I analyze the presentation to the public of this project and the technology it uses…
Beyond mystery: Putting algorithmic accountability in context
Critical algorithm scholarship has demonstrated the difficulties of attributing accountability for the actions and effects of algorithmic systems. In this commentary, we argue that we cannot stop at denouncing the lack of accountability for algorithms and their effects but must engage the broader systems and distributed agencies that algorithmic systems exist within; including standards, regulations, technologies, and social relations. To this en…
The Anthropology of Water
The anthropology of water is a self-declared relational field that attempts to transcend nature/culture distinctions by attending to the fact that the social and ecological aspects of water are separated only by convention. Despite its recent coming of age, the anthropology of water is incredibly expansive. It attends to molecular, embodied, ecosystemic, and planetary issues. I provide an overview of that breadth in four thematic clusters: (in)su…
Success through Failure: Translation, Temporal Tricks, and Numeric Concept-Work
Devices: A location for feminist analytics and praxis
This article offers the device as a methodological tool and concrete space for feminist praxis that can challenge the order of a world that is patriarchal, racist, and organized around capital extraction. Material or immaterial in form, a device is a tool through which different actors ground, produce, and concretize technological, legal, scientific, and political work. Many objects can become devices when pragmatically activated toward a particu…
The Re-Combinatory Nature of Property within Racial Regimes of Ownership
At a time when enduring and entrenched structures of racial inequality and oppression have become public objects of concern in Euro-America, it is easy to feel as if those historical legacies and structural forces are too powerful to be challenged. And yet, it is precisely at this kind of historical moment that it is crucial to not only diagnose existing structures, but also identify the specific legal and institutional mechanisms through which t…
Casual Planetarities
Planetary awareness has become synonymous with awareness of large-scale temporal, geographic, and geologic events. Given the scalar multiplicities and instabilities of life on earth, concepts such as planetarity, the Anthropocene, and even the global have provided analytic reprieve. They name that which is difficult to objectify: the geographic and historical vastness of geological presence. But those concepts grow from knowledge habits inherited…
Afterword: Trust: Too much, too little, never just enough
This afterword explores trust as a troubled and turbulent social relation that takes exuberant social forms and often operates as a contested ideology. It highlights how trust-seeking technologies yield unexpected effects, such as forms of sociality without social life, hyper-awareness of geographic context as a means for effective surveillance, a displacement of intimate arts of diplomacy in favour of resilience and distance, uncomfortable relat…
What is a financial frontier
Trusts at the financial frontier: The Flickering Forms of Property, Water, and Governance
Financialization is often understood as an expansive, spreading wave, coming from an energetic, global center of finance and creating new financial frontiers at its edges. Instead of presuming this expansive wave, I show how financial frontiers are flickering arrangements. Rather than spreading continuously, financial frontiers come into being, go dormant, and reignite with intensity. This temporal dynamic becomes apparent when we trace the speci…
Los hechos nunca andan solos: The future of facts in Latin America
The persistence of long facts: Truth and consequence in Costa Rica's aquifers
At the center of decades-long water conflicts in northwest Costa Rica, a particular fact has had a contentious status: whether the aquifers supplying the area hold sufficient water for collective life. I refer to this as the sufficiency fact, which has been established, debunked, and reestablished multiple times. To understand this peculiar dynamic, I zoom into discussions among community and business representatives about the future of these aqu…
Retooling: A Model of Sociotechnical Change for Turbulent Times
Retooling is a ubiquitous practice that mobilizes innovation, maintenance, and repair to address sociotechnical change in times when transformations seem difficult to accomplish. Retooling entails an intentional reorientation of purpose, foregrounds the nonlinear trajectories of technological and scientific shifts, and focuses our attention on the meso level of organizational and collective life. This paper offers a theorization of retooling grou…
Planetaridades Casuais: Coreografias, Ressonância e a Presença Geológica de Pessoas e Aquíferos
Consciência planetária tem se tornado sinônimo da consciência de eventos temporais, geográficos e geológicos de larga escala. Dadas as multiplicidades e instabilidades escalares da vida na terra, conceitos como planetaridade, Antropoceno, e mesmo global, têm fornecido alívio analítico. Elas nomeiam aquilo que é difícil de objetificar: a vastidão geográfica e histórica da presença geológica. No entanto, tais conceitos são devedores de hábitos de c…
Political science (12 works) · Sociology (11 works) · Law (10 works) · Water Governance and Infrastructure (10 works) · Computer Science (9 works) · Epistemology (9 works) · Philosophy (9 works) · Politics (7 works) · Geographies of human-animal interactions (6 works) · Environmental ethics (5 works)