ICS Seminar - Andrea Ballestero

Aquifer: Ethnography and responsibility at the edges of a concept

Event Details:

Date and Time: Thursday, 20 October, 11:30am - 1:00pm

Location: online via Zoom. Please RSVP via email to j.krajacic@westernsydney.edu.au by 19th October COB. (the zoom link will only be sent to those who RSVP to attend via zoom).

Presenter: Andrea Ballestero (University of Southern California)

Abstract: Imagining what life will become in the near future, public officials and community members on Costa Rica’s Caribbean coast are coming together to take responsibility for underground water worlds. In the process 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 back. I ask what are the stakes of doing so, and what kind of responsibility for subterranean water worlds is possible in that movement? 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.

Andrea Ballestero is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at Rice University, US, where she also runs the Ethnography Studio, an interdisciplinary experimental space that brings together students and faculty interested in the peculiarities of ethnography as a textual form, as a research strategy and as a modality of knowledge production. Her work looks at the unexpected ethical and technical entanglements through which experts understand water in Latin America. She is particularly interested in spaces where the law, economics and techno-science are so fused that they appear as one another. In recent years she has been following the paths of water pricing in Costa Rica, bureaucratic care for water in Brazil, and traveling water knowledge throughout Latin America.

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The Institute for Culture and Society is located in Parramatta, “the place where the eel sets down” in Dharug language,
along the north bank of the Parramatta River. It sits on the traditional lands and waters of the Burramattagal people of the Dharug Nation,
who have been stewards and caretakers of these territories since time immemorial, in what today is referred to as Greater Western Sydney,
one of the most diverse cultural communities in the world and home to the largest number of Indigenous Australians in the country.
The Institute for Culture and Society acknowledges the Dharug, Eora, Dharawal (also referred to as Tharawal)
and Wiradjuri peoples as traditional custodians and Indigenous knowledge-holders, whose storytelling serve
as historical record, a form of teaching and learning, a way to care for Country,
and an expression of Indigenous culture and identity.