About

Andrea Ballestero is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at USC Dornsife. Her research combines political and legal anthropology, Science and Technology Studies (STS), and social studies of finance and economics. She is particularly interested in spaces where law, economics, and techno-science are so fused that they appear as one another. Her first book, 'A Future History of Water,' explores how the distinction between human rights and commodities is produced within regulatory and governance spaces that promote openness to different forms of knowledge and experimentation. She has worked with regulators, policymakers, and NGOs in Costa Rica and Brazil, tracing how technolegal devices embody moral distinctions, question the foundations of liberal capitalist societies, and help people inhabit non-linear and generative futures. Ballestero has also co-edited a collection of ethnographic analysis protocols titled 'Experimenting with Ethnography: A Companion to Analysis,' emphasizing ethnography's power for conceptual openness and practical engagement with the worlds it studies. Currently, she is working on a project examining how subterranean space is re-invented through remote sensing, scientific practice, and legal technologies, transforming it into a new planetary frontier. Her work investigates how climate change and new regulations are changing perceptions and legal understandings of underground water and space, especially in Costa Rica, and how law and technology intersect when extraction is no longer the dominant logic. Since 2011, she has run the Ethnography Studio, an interdisciplinary space fostering ethnographic research as a textual form, strategy, and knowledge production modality, emphasizing collaboration, rigor, and generosity.

Research topics

• Geography
• History

Selected publications

• Planetaridades Casuais

  Interseções Revista de Estudos Interdisciplinares · 2026-01-13

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  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 conhecimento herdados de lógicas imperiais e da Guerra Fria e podem supor a existência de um observador universal capaz de compreender a unidade do planeta enquanto tal. Este artigo explora pressupostos alternativos. Questiona como outras práticas da terra lidam com escalas planetárias de criação de sentido. Conceitualiza essas práticas como formas de planetaridade casual, que, em vez de recorrer a escalas preexistentes, tais como o planeta ou o Antropoceno, produzem sentidos de proximidade e/ou distância entre a vida quotidiana e as implicações geológicas da presença humana. Acompanha o trabalho de geólogos na Costa Rica, que contam com um modelo físico 3D para provocar oscilações escalares que conectam experiências humanas com a vastidão de mundos subterrâneos. Essa associação é tornada possível pelo foco no movimento das águas como uma coreografia hidro-geo-social da vida cotidiana. O artigo mostra como o poder ressonante do modelo 3D, que os geólogos usam para encenar essas coreografias, abre vias para que as pessoas lidem com sua presença geológica sem ter que ver o planeta como um todo ou presumir a capacidade para observação total.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Retooling: A Model of Sociotechnical Change for Turbulent Times

  Engaging Science Technology and Society · 2025-12-31

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  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 grounded in two case studies: one about water reuse technologies in the United States and the other about efforts to refashion the sugarcane industry in Brazil. We suggest that retooling is a useful analytic tool at a time when both innovation and maintenance seem not only difficult to differentiate but also insufficient for explaining sociotechnical change on their own. Furthermore, during turbulent times when change seems difficult to accomplish, retooling offers a capacious conceptualization that highlights the political orientations that inspire all sociotechnical transformations and the possibilities that emerge from mobilizing what-is to bring about what-should-be.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Identifying Analytic Moves v1

  2024-05-15

  preprintOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  When we are working through existing literature, the data/materials we collect or produce, and our own writing within the interpretive social sciences or humanities, there is a tendency to privilege two things: overall argument and what we might call information or empirics. However, there is something else we can identify as well, which we have come to understand as analytic moves. Analytic moves are tactical decisions about how to make the intrinsic relation between the conceptual and the empiric spark. As moves, they may be needed at a particular conjuncture but are not overall principles that apply everywhere and all the time. We can think of analytic moves as the building blocks of an argument, the smallest gestures we make when making sense of the world. Importantly, it is in these smallest units that the politics of one’s work seep in, revealing those areas that we have taken for granted and maybe not paid so much attention to. Watch an associated video of the authors discussing analytic moves at https://www.emergematrix.org/projects under "Cabinet of Curious Practices."

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• The persistence of long facts: truth and consequence in Costa Rica’s aquifers

  Tapuya Latin American Science Technology and Society · 2024-10-18

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  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 aquifers. There, in the density of social life, I show how as place-specific formations, facts are “long” entities that remain tied to their interpretations and, crucially, to their potential consequences. As opposed to the ideal of short facts that characterizes modern science, long facts reveal the rich social life that facticity takes in the twenty-first century. Long facts are always contested, explicitly political, and unable to be separated from their potential consequences. In contrast to scholarship that diagnoses the loss of the value of truth within the contemporary moment, I suggest it is critical to understand the abundance of regimes of facticity that surround us and what they make possible leaving behind assumptions of deficit and lack.

  PublisherDOI

• Los hechos nunca andan solos: The future of facts in Latin America

  Tapuya Latin American Science Technology and Society · 2024-12-10 · 2 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Acknowledgments

  Duke University Press eBooks · 2023

  • Geography
  • History
  DOI

• Casual Planetarities

  Environmental Humanities · 2023-11-01 · 9 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract 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 from imperial and Cold War logics and can presume the existence of an all-encompassing observer who can grasp the unity of the planet as such. This article explores alternative assumptions. It asks how other practices of the earth deal with planetary scales of sense-making. It conceptualizes those practices as forms of casual planetarity that, instead of drawing on preexisting scales such as the planet or the Anthropocene, produce senses of closeness and/or distance between everyday life and the geological implications of human presence. It follows the work of geologists in Costa Rica who rely on a 3D physical model to bring about scalar oscillations that connect human experiences with the vastness of underground worlds. This association is made possible by focusing on the movement of water as a hydro-geo-social choreography of everyday life. The article shows how the resonant power of the 3D model geologists use to enact these choreographies opens pathways for people to come to terms with their geological presence without having to see the planet as a whole or presume the capacity for total observation.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Ethnography

  2023-10-06

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Ethnography is a reflexive research approach built on systematic engagements over a sustained time period. It is designed to offer an account of the relation between everyday practices and taken-for-granted ideas and assumptions about social life. Ethnography offers nuanced, contextualized, rich insights into social life. This lesson familiarizes students with the parameters of ethnographic research and guides them through the main phases of project development.

  PublisherDOI

• What is a financial frontier?

  Journal of Cultural Economy · 2023-03-01 · 21 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Index

  The MIT Press eBooks · 2023-04-04

  paratextOpen access
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Recent grants

• Aquifers, Science, and Spatial Imaginaries

  NSF · $453k · 2021–2026

Frequent coauthors

• Dominic Boyer

  Rice University

  18 shared

• Cymene Howe

  Rice University

  18 shared

• Michael Fisch

  University of Rochester

  17 shared

• Ryo Morimoto

  Tohoku University

  16 shared

• Lorenzo Morison

  University of Rochester

  16 shared

• Warwick Anderson

  University of Sydney

  16 shared

• Anita Engelstad

  16 shared

• Joe Masco

  University of California, San Diego

  16 shared

Education

• PhD, Anthropology

  University of California Irvine

  2010