Andrea Ballestero | University of Southern California (original) (raw)
Papers by Andrea Ballestero
Journal of Cultural Economy, 2023
At Tingshua University, researchers convene at the China Financial Frontier Center to study globa... more At Tingshua University, researchers convene at the China Financial Frontier Center to study global economic governance. 1 At the Federalist Society, a conservative legal and policy think-tank in the United States, researchers examine the PayDay loan industry and label it a financial frontier. 2 The Collaborative for Frontier Finance, led by former Wall Street and World Bank employees, provides capital for businesses at 'frontier and emerging markets.' 3 What makes the concept of a financial frontier so capacious? And, how do scholars, practitioners, and the media mobilize this concept to speak of the proliferation of finance as a social form? This special issue attends to these questions by thinking laterally, from frontier to frontier, and across several continents and historical periods. Without settling on a restrictive definition, we approach the financial frontier as a set of tactics for raising and managing financial capital that result in forms of conversion, intensification, and proliferation. Conversion refers to how domains of social life previously not understood to be financial, become so. Intensification speaks to a qualitative shift in how established financial practices and institutions deepen their reach, expanding, or even reinventing their form. Proliferation denotes the quantitative growth of techniques, actors, and organizations that come to actively participate in finance (see also Tsing 2003, 5102). But there is more; Practitioners and social commentators recognize frontiers as distinct situations where something novel or at least unusual takes place in unprecedented, or unexpected, locations. For financial actorsincluding financial institutions, investors, lenders, borrowers, and the brokers that mediate financial transactionsthe frontier signals new opportunities beyond the strictures of historically existing sites of finance. For those on the ground, the frontier often pairs theft and dispossession with the excesses of accumulation; it holds together exhausted worlds and new hopes for autonomy and even freedom. The financial frontier is thus not a place but a conceptual orientation, a set of traveling processes, theories, and practices (Tsing 2003, 5101; Muniesa and Doganova 2020, 97). Instead of establishing where a frontier sits geographically, the papers in this collection take a different entry point by asking how devices, temporalities, scales, and bordering practices provide frontiers with their character and shape. They share a commitment to studying these processes in granular and grounded ways. Scholars and practitioners based in EuroAmerica have used the notion of a financial frontier to signal the expansion of finance into new areas of life and new geographic locations. By declaring a frontier, they performatively assert and propel frontier thinking forward (Cody 2020, 404), reinforcing a concept that is charged with what Ballestero (this issue) critiques as an 'expansive wavemodel' that takes financialization as the movement of financial practices and logics from a point of origin, presumably located in EuroAmerica and in classic financial institutions (e.g. financial markets, banks, investors and traders, etc.
Law & Social Inquiry
At a time when enduring and entrenched structures of racial inequality and oppression have become... more 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 those legacies and forces are entrenched. Racism, dispossession, and cultural erasure come to be through very concrete institutions and practices that are far from fully coherent. Challenging their legacy requires paying attention to the specific techno-legal devices that cement them in time. Technolegal devices channel political work in a way that welds practices and desires with long-standing assumptions about sociality that have been embedded in technical languages (Ballestero 2019). Without those techno-legal devices, legacies of racism and property cannot be enacted in the everyday. And yet, while reproducing a racist social order, these devices are also points of weakness. They can create instability to upend that social order. Brenna Bhandar's Colonial Lives of Property: Law, Land, and Racial Regimes of Ownership (Duke 2019) is a powerful book. It provides an arresting account of the devices through which a violent and naturalized sense of property emerges from colonial contexts, along with its concomitant racism. The book combines thorough legal history with careful critique of the institution of property as a racial formation. It offers a textured empirical picture while expanding our imagination of the worlds we would like to see in its place. Brenna Bhandar has provided a theoretical tour de force centered on the rationalities that make possible the convergence of property, identity, race, and gender-a convergence that excludes and dispossesses indigenous peoples around the world.
Energy Worlds in Experiment is an experiment in writing about energy and an exploration of energy... more Energy Worlds in Experiment is an experiment in writing about energy and an exploration of energy infrastructures as experiments. Twenty authors have written collaborative chapters that examine energy politics and practices, from electricity cables and energy monitors to swamps and estuaries. Each chapter proposes a unique format to tell energy worlds differently and to stimulate energy imaginaries: thesis, propositions, interviews, stories, card games, and a graphic novel. The book offers practitioners, students, and scholars a range of new tools to help think, engage and critique energy politics, practices and infrastructures.
The AAG Review of Books, 2022
The International Encyclopedia of Anthropology, 2018
American Ethnologist, 2018
Annual Review of Anthropology, 2019
The anthropology of water is a self-declared relational field that attempts to transcend nature/c... more 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)sufficiency, bodies and beings, knowledge, and ownership. These clusters highlight issues of materiality, ontological politics, and political economy. They are the grounds on which questions of water justice are elucidated. Furthermore, I show how water is always more than itself; its force and material presence constantly frame people's efforts to address the fundamental question of what it means to live life collectively in a world that is always more than human. I close with two directions for research: the denaturalization of water'...
Science, Technology, & Human Values, 2019
This paper is an ethnographic examination of the early social life of a project to map Costa Rica... more 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 to show how vision and touch are conceptual resources that people use to describe the technicalities of satellite imagery. Attending to the semiotic and technical power of vision and touch requires a nonessentialist understanding of the senses. It requires moving away from a narrow understanding of sensing as embodied, phenomenological practice. Focusing on the role of texture as that which operates in the interstices of vision and touch, I propose going beyond panoptic imaginaries in order to grasp the diverse social lives that technologie...
A Future History of Water, 2019
Social Anthropology, 2017
This paper discusses the recent emergence of ontological approaches in science and technology stu... more 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 the 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.
Big Data & Society, 2019
Critical algorithm scholarship has demonstrated the difficulties of attributing accountability fo... more 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 end, we explore accountability in “the Generated Detective,” an algorithmically generated comic. Taking up the mantle of detectives ourselves, we investigate accountability in relation to this piece of experimental fiction. We problematize efforts to effect accountability through transparency by undertaking a simple operation: asking for permission to re-publish a set of the algorithmically selected and modified words and images which make the frames of the comic. Recounting this process, we demonstrate slippage between the “complication” of t...
American Anthropologist, 2019
The Cambridge Journal of Anthropology, 2017
PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review, 2012
Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies, 2014
Journal of Cultural Economy, 2023
At Tingshua University, researchers convene at the China Financial Frontier Center to study globa... more At Tingshua University, researchers convene at the China Financial Frontier Center to study global economic governance. 1 At the Federalist Society, a conservative legal and policy think-tank in the United States, researchers examine the PayDay loan industry and label it a financial frontier. 2 The Collaborative for Frontier Finance, led by former Wall Street and World Bank employees, provides capital for businesses at 'frontier and emerging markets.' 3 What makes the concept of a financial frontier so capacious? And, how do scholars, practitioners, and the media mobilize this concept to speak of the proliferation of finance as a social form? This special issue attends to these questions by thinking laterally, from frontier to frontier, and across several continents and historical periods. Without settling on a restrictive definition, we approach the financial frontier as a set of tactics for raising and managing financial capital that result in forms of conversion, intensification, and proliferation. Conversion refers to how domains of social life previously not understood to be financial, become so. Intensification speaks to a qualitative shift in how established financial practices and institutions deepen their reach, expanding, or even reinventing their form. Proliferation denotes the quantitative growth of techniques, actors, and organizations that come to actively participate in finance (see also Tsing 2003, 5102). But there is more; Practitioners and social commentators recognize frontiers as distinct situations where something novel or at least unusual takes place in unprecedented, or unexpected, locations. For financial actorsincluding financial institutions, investors, lenders, borrowers, and the brokers that mediate financial transactionsthe frontier signals new opportunities beyond the strictures of historically existing sites of finance. For those on the ground, the frontier often pairs theft and dispossession with the excesses of accumulation; it holds together exhausted worlds and new hopes for autonomy and even freedom. The financial frontier is thus not a place but a conceptual orientation, a set of traveling processes, theories, and practices (Tsing 2003, 5101; Muniesa and Doganova 2020, 97). Instead of establishing where a frontier sits geographically, the papers in this collection take a different entry point by asking how devices, temporalities, scales, and bordering practices provide frontiers with their character and shape. They share a commitment to studying these processes in granular and grounded ways. Scholars and practitioners based in EuroAmerica have used the notion of a financial frontier to signal the expansion of finance into new areas of life and new geographic locations. By declaring a frontier, they performatively assert and propel frontier thinking forward (Cody 2020, 404), reinforcing a concept that is charged with what Ballestero (this issue) critiques as an 'expansive wavemodel' that takes financialization as the movement of financial practices and logics from a point of origin, presumably located in EuroAmerica and in classic financial institutions (e.g. financial markets, banks, investors and traders, etc.
Law & Social Inquiry
At a time when enduring and entrenched structures of racial inequality and oppression have become... more 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 those legacies and forces are entrenched. Racism, dispossession, and cultural erasure come to be through very concrete institutions and practices that are far from fully coherent. Challenging their legacy requires paying attention to the specific techno-legal devices that cement them in time. Technolegal devices channel political work in a way that welds practices and desires with long-standing assumptions about sociality that have been embedded in technical languages (Ballestero 2019). Without those techno-legal devices, legacies of racism and property cannot be enacted in the everyday. And yet, while reproducing a racist social order, these devices are also points of weakness. They can create instability to upend that social order. Brenna Bhandar's Colonial Lives of Property: Law, Land, and Racial Regimes of Ownership (Duke 2019) is a powerful book. It provides an arresting account of the devices through which a violent and naturalized sense of property emerges from colonial contexts, along with its concomitant racism. The book combines thorough legal history with careful critique of the institution of property as a racial formation. It offers a textured empirical picture while expanding our imagination of the worlds we would like to see in its place. Brenna Bhandar has provided a theoretical tour de force centered on the rationalities that make possible the convergence of property, identity, race, and gender-a convergence that excludes and dispossesses indigenous peoples around the world.
Energy Worlds in Experiment is an experiment in writing about energy and an exploration of energy... more Energy Worlds in Experiment is an experiment in writing about energy and an exploration of energy infrastructures as experiments. Twenty authors have written collaborative chapters that examine energy politics and practices, from electricity cables and energy monitors to swamps and estuaries. Each chapter proposes a unique format to tell energy worlds differently and to stimulate energy imaginaries: thesis, propositions, interviews, stories, card games, and a graphic novel. The book offers practitioners, students, and scholars a range of new tools to help think, engage and critique energy politics, practices and infrastructures.
The AAG Review of Books, 2022
The International Encyclopedia of Anthropology, 2018
American Ethnologist, 2018
Annual Review of Anthropology, 2019
The anthropology of water is a self-declared relational field that attempts to transcend nature/c... more 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)sufficiency, bodies and beings, knowledge, and ownership. These clusters highlight issues of materiality, ontological politics, and political economy. They are the grounds on which questions of water justice are elucidated. Furthermore, I show how water is always more than itself; its force and material presence constantly frame people's efforts to address the fundamental question of what it means to live life collectively in a world that is always more than human. I close with two directions for research: the denaturalization of water'...
Science, Technology, & Human Values, 2019
This paper is an ethnographic examination of the early social life of a project to map Costa Rica... more 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 to show how vision and touch are conceptual resources that people use to describe the technicalities of satellite imagery. Attending to the semiotic and technical power of vision and touch requires a nonessentialist understanding of the senses. It requires moving away from a narrow understanding of sensing as embodied, phenomenological practice. Focusing on the role of texture as that which operates in the interstices of vision and touch, I propose going beyond panoptic imaginaries in order to grasp the diverse social lives that technologie...
A Future History of Water, 2019
Social Anthropology, 2017
This paper discusses the recent emergence of ontological approaches in science and technology stu... more 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 the 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.
Big Data & Society, 2019
Critical algorithm scholarship has demonstrated the difficulties of attributing accountability fo... more 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 end, we explore accountability in “the Generated Detective,” an algorithmically generated comic. Taking up the mantle of detectives ourselves, we investigate accountability in relation to this piece of experimental fiction. We problematize efforts to effect accountability through transparency by undertaking a simple operation: asking for permission to re-publish a set of the algorithmically selected and modified words and images which make the frames of the comic. Recounting this process, we demonstrate slippage between the “complication” of t...
American Anthropologist, 2019
The Cambridge Journal of Anthropology, 2017
PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review, 2012
Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies, 2014
American Anthropologist, 2019
Special review section on Sally Engle Merry's, 'The Seductions of Quantification'.
Theory from the South is a provocative book intended to add an element of play in the evolutionar... more Theory from the South is a provocative book intended to add an element of play in the evolutionary and progress-based rhetoric that undergirds political projects around the world. The authors take issue with the entrenched colonial paradigm in which post-colonies continue to change toward models and images of the North to suggest that in fact, the inverse is true. Africa, Latin America and Asia look more like the future, than the past. The authors do not quite make an argument of reversed linearity, yet they are not completely beyond that logic, and so they pose that the world is witnessing an eastward and southward dislocation of the most dynamic and innovative centers of value production. Political geographies of core and periphery, they assert, are increasingly unable to explain this geographic shift (p. 7). The authors examine this dislocation through seven chapters that focus on personhood, liberalism, democracy, the politics of the body, history, and the paradoxes of borders. Each chapter offers a textured example of forewarning, anticipation, and foreshadowing of the North by Africa.
American Anthropologist, 2011
Based on fieldwork among state officials, NGOs, politicians, and activists in Costa Rica and Braz... more Based on fieldwork among state officials, NGOs, politicians, and activists in Costa Rica and Brazil, A Future History of Water traces the unspectacular work necessary to make water access a human right and a human right something different from a commodity. Andrea Ballestero shows how these ephemeral distinctions are made through four technolegal devices—formula, index, list and pact. She argues that what is at stake in these devices is not the making of a distinct future but what counts as the future in the first place. A Future History of Water is an ethnographically rich and conceptually charged journey into ant-filled water meters, fantastical water taxonomies, promises captured on slips of paper, and statistical maneuvers that dissolve the human of human rights. Ultimately, Ballestero demonstrates what happens when instead of trying to fix its meaning, we make water’s changing form the precondition of our analyses. [Open Access following this link: http://oapen.org/search?identifier=1005198 ]
Colection of articles of different authors about the progress in natural resources policies in Ce... more Colection of articles of different authors about the progress in natural resources policies in Central America
San Joseé, CR. University …, Jan 1, 2008
Experimenting with Ethnography: A Companion to Analysis, 2021
Experimenting with Ethnography collects twenty-one essays that open new paths for doing ethnograp... more Experimenting with Ethnography collects twenty-one essays that open new paths for doing ethnographic analysis. The contributors—who come from a variety of intellectual and methodological traditions—enliven analysis by refusing to take it as an abstract, disembodied exercise. Rather, they frame it as a concrete mode of action and a creative practice. Encompassing topics ranging from language and the body to technology and modes of collaboration, the essays invite readers to focus on the imaginative work that needs to be performed prior to completing an argument. Whether exchanging objects, showing how to use drawn images as a way to analyze data, or working with smartphones, sound recordings, and social media as analytic devices, the contributors explore the deliberate processes for pursuing experimental thinking through ethnography. Practical and broad in theoretical scope, Experimenting with Ethnography is an indispensable companion for all ethnographers.