About

Casey Walsh is a Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He specializes in Sociocultural Anthropology with a focus on political economy, the Mexico-United States borderlands, water, commodities, history, and materialisms. Walsh holds a PhD from the New School for Social Research and his research interests encompass anthropological political economy, particularly in arid regions such as northern Mexico and the US southwest, including California. His work examines how water, land, and labor are organized to produce commodities, with notable contributions through his books 'Building the Borderlands' and 'Virtuous Waters,' which explore borderland infrastructure, society, culture, and water management practices over time. Recently, he has conducted ethnographic research on groundwater management in California's Central Coast, analyzing the enactment of legislation like the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act (SGMA). Additionally, Walsh investigates the history of anthropological thought, emphasizing perspectives outside Europe and North America, and their influence on development and state formation. His projects include studies on groundwater and grape cultivation, mineral springs, and water in the Mexican borderlands, contributing to a nuanced understanding of water's social, environmental, and political dimensions.

Research topics

• Sociology
• Political Science
• Law
• Humanities
• Environmental science
• Political economy
• Psychology
• Ecology
• Art
• Environmental ethics
• Geology
• Geography
• Engineering
• Social psychology
• Geotechnical engineering
• Water resource management
• Environmental engineering

Selected publications

• Chapter 5 — Peasants, Crime, and War in Rural Mexico

  Berghahn Books · 2022-09-27

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• “It's the Thing I Don't Want to Talk About” to “You Have to Talk About Dying if You Have Cancer”: Adolescent and Young Adult and Parent Perspectives on End-of-Life Discussions (RP416)

  Journal of Pain and Symptom Management · 2022-05-17 · 1 citations

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  PublisherDOI

• Hydraulic Opulence: Artesian Wells and bathing in Mexico, 1850–1900

  Water History · 2022 · 3 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Water resource management
  • Engineering
  • Environmental science

  Abstract 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.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Beyond rules and norms: Heterogeneity, ubiquity, and visibility of groundwaters

  Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews Water · 2022 · 18 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Sociology
  • Environmental ethics

  Abstract 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.

  PublisherDOI

• Parsing the Politics of Singular and Multiple Waters

  Zurich Open Repository and Archive (University of Zurich) · 2021-02-05

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  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.

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• <b>Ballestero, Andrea.</b><i>A Future History of Water.</i>Durham: Duke UP, 2019. 232 pp.

  Luso-Brazilian Review · 2021-01-01

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• Waters, Water and the Hydrosocial Politics of Bathing in Mexico City, 1850-1920

  DOAJ (DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals) · 2021-01-01 · 3 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  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 the same time, promote the healing properties of social bathing in chemically heterogeneous waters.

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• Un acto de amor. Un Manifiesto de Acceso Abierto por la libertad, la integridad y la creatividad en las humanidades y las ciencias sociales interpretativas

  UNICA IRIS Institutional Research Information System (University of Cagliari) · 2020-12-29

  articleOpen access

  Un acto de amor. Un Manifiesto de Acceso Abierto por la Libertad, la Integridad y la Creatividad en las Humanidades y las Ciencias Sociales Interpretativas, es el resultado de un taller financiado por la Infraestructura de Investigación y la Inversión de la LSE, titulado Academic Freedom, Academic Integrity and Open Access in the Social Sciences, organizado por Andrea E. Pia y celebrado en la London School of Economics el 9 de septiembre de 2019.

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• Un atto d’amore: Manifesto Open Access per la libertà, l’integrità e la creatività nelle scienze umane e nelle scienze sociali interpretative

  ANUAC. · 2020-12-31

  articleOpen access

  Un atto d’amore: Manifesto Open Access per la libertà, l’integrità e la creatività nelle scienze umane e nelle scienze sociali interpretative, è il risultato di un workshop finanziato da LSE Research Infrastructure and Investment Funds dal titolo Academic Freedom, Academic Integrity and Open Access in the Social Sciences, organizzato da Andrea E. Pia e tenuto presso la London School of Economics il 9 settembre 2019.

  PublisherDOI

• Sobre Luis Aboites Aguilar, El norte mexicano sin algodones, 1970‐2010. Estancamiento, inconformidad y adiós al optimismo

  Historia Mexicana · 2020-09-07

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Frequent coauthors

• Jon Schubert

  University of Basel

  5 shared

• Simon Batterbury

  University of Melbourne

  5 shared

• Andrea E. Pia

  5 shared

• Agathe Mora

  University of Sussex

  5 shared

• Gerda Wielander

  University of Westminster

  5 shared

• Ivan Franceschini

  University of Melbourne

  4 shared

• Nicholas Loubere

  Lund University

  4 shared

• Agnieszka Joniak‐Lüthi

  4 shared

Education

• PhD , Anthropology

  New School for Social Research

  2001