Casey Walsh - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

Papers by Casey Walsh

Luso-Brazilian Review, 2021

The Western Historical Quarterly, 2015

Western Historical Quarterly, 2015

WIREs Water

Over the last 150 years or so engineers, farmers, scientists, and many others around the globe ha... more Over the last 150 years or so engineers, farmers, scientists, and many others around the globe have gained access to the waters that lie underground with drilling technology, pumps and cheap energy. Since the mid-twentieth century, a massive worldwide proliferation of deep wells has redistributed groundwaters away from springs, seeps, wells, and oases, robbing them of the water that supports local sustainable socionatural relations. The idea and social fact of groundwater has emerged in this history, and has three distinguishing features: heterogeneity, ubiquity, and visibility. The failure to halt depletion has prompted a turn to culture in the hope of governing the liquid sustainably. However, rather than grapple with the complexities and contradictions of heterogeneity, ubiquity, and visibility, these efforts take a rather thin view of culture-as rules, norms, and institutions to be studied, codified and deployed to address the crisis. This instrumental understanding of culture as a set of traits to be selectively used for arresting depletion has not proven effective, however, compelling us to rethink our cultural, political, and economic engagements with groundwater.

Apuntes de Investigación del CECYP, 2019

Se discute el trabajo de un grupo interdisciplinario de autores, que a partir de mediados de los ... more Se discute el trabajo de un grupo interdisciplinario de autores, que a partir de mediados de los ochenta han intentado comprender la formacion del Estado mexicano posrevolucionario, enfocando su atencion en la cultura popular, generalmente en un contexto regional o local. Su trabajo se halla representado del modo mas conciso en el volumen editado por Gilber Joseph y Daniel Nugent, Everyday Forms of State Formation: Revolution and the Negotiation of Rule in Modern Mexico .

Wires Water, 2022

Water History

Before 1850 Mexico City’s scarce water resources were produced by a handful of nearby springs cha... more Before 1850 Mexico City’s scarce water resources were produced by a handful of nearby springs channeled through centuries-old city infrastructures to a limited number of taps in large houses and to public fountains that served the majority of the population. In the second half of the nineteenth century, artesian wells tapping the Valley of Mexico’s aquifers enabled landowners and businessmen to produce copious amounts of water almost anywhere with little effort. Private access to groundwater supplied newly built bathhouses and propelled changes to, and the rapid expansion of, social practices of bathing and swimming. This infrastructure, expanded supply, and new practices gave shape to a widely shared and historically durable assumption that there are no limits to the supply of water – what I call hydraulic opulence. After 1900 hydraulic opulence fueled soaring demand and continuous efforts by the state to expand hydraulic infrastructure and supply.

This Special Issue explores the politics of heterogeneous waters. Modern technoscientific water m... more This Special Issue explores the politics of heterogeneous waters. Modern technoscientific water management regimes have driven the consolidation of power over water and those who use it through a material, cultural, and political process of centralisation and homogenisation. Despite this expanding uniformity, numerous scholars have called attention to the thriving heterogeneity of waters and water cultures. How do we reconcile these two views? In this introduction to the Special Issue, we propose that the relationship between water and waters is not either/or, as water/waters, but rather something more simultaneous and conjoined: water-waters. This approach displaces conceptual and temporal (before/after, premodern/modern) dichotomies and recognises that the processes through which water is made homogenous or heterogeneous (or both) are distinctly political. We conclude by introducing the anthropological and historical contributions to this special issue, which examine the political effects exercised by various kinds of waters and how people deal with the manifold permutations of water's multiplicity. The articles assembled here show how uniform 'water' rarely fully replaces or displaces 'waters' materially or ontologically, but rather that they coexist in a tense and dynamic political balance.

Water Alternatives, 2021

Before the emergence of microbiology in the 1860s, the relationship between health and water was ... more Before the emergence of microbiology in the 1860s, the relationship between health and water was understood to hinge mostly on its manifold mineral qualities; medical treatments often involved bathing in particular waters to take advantage of their curative powers. With the help of microscopes, those waters came to be seen as home to dangerous microbes and a cause, as much as a cure, of disease. But while biology placed water management on a new footing, ideas from chemistry about the diverse positive medical effects of mineral waters continued to justify the use of those heterogeneous sources for bathing in pools and spas. In this article, I trace this slow, incomplete transition from chemical to biological understandings of waters and health in Mexico City in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Contradictory hydrosocial processes took shape as scientists, businesspeople and politicians sought to deliver biologically pure, potable public water to individual bathrooms and to, at...

Labour of Love: An Open Access Manifesto for Freedom, Integrity, and Creativity in the Humanities... more Labour of Love: An Open Access Manifesto for Freedom, Integrity, and Creativity in the Humanities and Interpretive Social Sciences, is the result of an LSE Research Infrastructure and Investment–funded workshop entitled Academic Freedom, Academic Integrity and Open Access in the Social Sciences, organised by Andrea E. Pia and held at the London School of Economics on September 9, 2019.

In Defense of Farmers, 2019

Journal of Latin American Studies, 2020

Nature and Culture, 2016

The articles in this section were written by social scientists from different parts of the world ... more The articles in this section were written by social scientists from different parts of the world doing research on the complex relationship between human beings and the natural environment, and on the role of cultural ideals in shaping environmental history. The interdisciplinary character of the papers generates original insights about the socio-cultural dimensions of the environmental problematic, which have been neglected when compared with economic and political dimensions. This introduction reviews the contents of the proposed special symposium and situates the articles in relation to discussions about the social role of utopias, imagined and real.

Seeds of Empire, 2015

By the late 1810s, a global revolution in cotton had remade the U.S.-Mexico border, bringing weal... more By the late 1810s, a global revolution in cotton had remade the U.S.-Mexico border, bringing wealth and waves of Americans to the Gulf Coast while also devastating the lives and villages of Mexicans in Texas. In response, Mexico threw open its northern territories to American farmers in hopes that cotton could bring prosperity to the region. Thousands of Anglo-Americans poured into Texas, but their insistence that slavery accompany them sparked pitched battles across Mexico. An extraordinary alliance of Anglos and Mexicans in Texas came together to defend slavery against abolitionists in the Mexican government, beginning a series of fights that culminated in the Texas Revolution. In the aftermath, Anglo-Americans rebuilt the Texas borderlands into the most unlikely creation: the first fully committed slaveholders' republic in North America. Seeds of Empire tells the remarkable story of how the cotton revolution of the early nineteenth century transformed northeastern Mexico into the western edge of the United States, and how the rise and spectacular collapse of the Republic of Texas as a nation built on cotton and slavery proved to be a blueprint for the Confederacy of the 1860s.

Journal of Latin American Geography, 2014

Latin American Perspectives, 2004

Since 1992 water scarcity in the Río Bravo/Rio Grande river basin has heightened tensions and con... more Since 1992 water scarcity in the Río Bravo/Rio Grande river basin has heightened tensions and conflicts among water users and politicians on both sides of the Mexico-U.S. border. This article argues that while this situation has been characterized as an international “water war” stemming from a “water crisis,” it is more accurately described as a series of conflicts between regional, binational and national actors generated by a “crisis of irrigated agriculture.” A close examination of the dynamics of these current water conflicts focused on the delta region of the Rio Bravo/Grande reveals a binational ecological consciousness among the agricultural users of the resource, the product of a long history of irrigated agricultural development in the borderlands. The article argues that these conflicts must be understood historically, and suggests that these binational, regional dynamics should be cultivated in the effort to negotiate the social dimensions of the crisis of irrigated agri...