Browsing by Author "Ballestero, Andrea"

Now showing 1 - 10 of 10
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    A Future History of Water
    (Duke University Press, 2019) Ballestero, Andrea
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    “All You See Is White Skin”: Race and Dermatology in the United States
    (2024-07-23) Oyarzun, Yesmar S; Ballestero, Andrea; Georges, Eugenia
    In the United States, dermatology education has lagged with respect to including learning materials that feature people with darker skin, leading to divergent outcomes for these patients and gaps in knowledge for trainees and providers. “All You See Is White Skin” engages the voices of dermatologists and dermatology trainees to contextualize, clarify, and critique what has been referred to as dermatology’s “problem with skin color.” This dissertation provides a nuanced understanding of the practices through which dermatologists come to understand skin and understand it differently with regard to skin color and race. I document and critique how the field of dermatology understands dark skin to always be abnormal, whether in a pathological or nonpathological state. Chapter 1 argues that learning how to see and describe skin lesions, in particular, is critical to dermatology trainees’ professionalization. Chapter 2 introduces the concept of “dark bodies,” the depersonalized bodies of people with dark skin, and shows how dark bodies are typically posed and understood to be abnormal: either pathological and diseased, or super and able to avoid damage. Both of these allow for abdication of responsibility for people with dark skin. In Chapter 3, I argue that a constellation of antiblack devices reproduce antiblackness in the specialty. Chapters 4 and 5 attend to the work that especially dermatologists of color have done since the mid 20th century to make people with dark skin visible in dermatology. Overall, this project destabilizes contemporary understandings of biomedical epistemology by showing how both seeing and not seeing are crucial to contemporary biomedicine.
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    Capacity as Aggregation: Promises, Water and a Form of Collective Care in Northeast Brazil
    (Berghahn, 2017) Ballestero, Andrea
    As the twenty-first century gets underway, people have been experimenting with many forms of political organization. In Northeast Brazil, that experimental spirit led to the creation of the Water Pact, a process involving more than eight thousand participants through a series of public promise-making rituals in which they made pledges to care for water, attending to the specificities of their own context. The Pact gathered those promises into a multi-scalar formation that, the organizers believed, would yield the necessary resources to address the state’s water problems. The Pact would break with an unsuccessful history of infrastructural and legal reforms concerning deep-water access in the state of Ceará. This article examines how that collective was produced, what its constituent units were and how the logic of aggregation guided practices leading to its coalescence. My purpose is to re-examine the aggregate as a quantitative form of capacity that should be qualitatively reconsidered.
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    Experimenting with Ethnography : A Companion to Analysis
    (Duke University Press, 2021) Ballestero, Andrea; Winthereik, Brit Ross
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    Making Sugar into Oil: Sugarcane Science and the Paradoxes of Renewable Futures in Brazil
    (2024-04-03) Ulrich, Katie; Ballestero, Andrea; Boyer, Dominic
    Amid fossil-fuel-driven climate change, finding sustainable replacements for everyday fuels and materials made from petroleum—from plastics to synthetic fabrics—has been a pressing concern for decades. Plant-based products, enabled by biotech, are one solution. However, “plant-based” or “bio-based” often generically stand in for ethical and sustainable consumption, while the social and environmental impacts of bioproducts can in fact replicate uneven structures of oppression. This dissertation theorizes such contradictions through studying scientists’ efforts to make biofuels, bioplastics, and other bioproducts from sugarcane in Brazil. If between the 16th and 20th centuries Brazilian sugarcane was located at the nexus of plantation and factory, in the 21st century it is squarely located at the nexus of industrial-agricultural field, flexible factory, and biotech laboratory. Complementing the extensive Brazilian scholarship on present-day sugarcane labor, this dissertation looks at another increasingly important site of sugarcane production: the production of knowledge in the lab. I argue that sugarcane-based renewables often reproduce petro-extractivism under the guise of sustainability, yet scientists’ practices also open other possibilities. This dissertation draws on ten years of ethnographic fieldwork and experimental cataloging methods (what I call a sugar library) in São Paulo, Brazil and California, US. I offer changeways as the dissertation’s key conceptual intervention: changeways are particular stories of broader social change embodied in patterns of practices, relations, materials, and molecules surrounding sugarcane-based bioproducts. Put differently, changeways are genres of socio-material change. Each chapter is guided by a key entry from my sugar library in order to analyze a different changeway: flexible change, substitutive change, generic change, sucro change, and excusive change. The first three tend to reproduce petro-extractivism, despite renewable ideals. When sugarcane is transformed into bioproducts, often another important transformation happens too: petro-capitalism’s culpability in climate crises is alchemically transformed into the idea that capitalism is the only way to solve climate change. However, the latter two changeways offer possibilities within and beyond petro-capitalism through challenging how raw materials are conceived in the first place, and challenging the very instrumentality of scientific knowledge production. In all, changeways name how scientists’ technical practices lay the molecular foundations for various ideologies of change in an era of climate change. The dissertation thus provides concepts for STS, environmental anthropology, and energy humanities around contemporary convergences of natural resource extraction, scientific knowledge production, and social transition.
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    Paradoxical Infrastructures: Ruins, Retrofit, and Risk
    (Sage, 2015) Howe, Cymene; Lockrem, Jessica; Appel, Hannah; Hackett, Edward; Boyer, Dominic; Hall, Randal; Schneider-Mayerson, Matthew; Pope, Albert; Gupta, Akhil; Rodwell, Elizabeth; Ballestero, Andrea; Durbin, Trevor; el-Dahdah, Farès; Long, Elizabeth; Mody, Cyrus C.M.; Center for Energy and Environmental Research in the Human Sciences
    In recent years, a dramatic increase in the study of infrastructure has occurred in the social sciences and humanities, following upon foundational work in the physical sciences, architecture, planning, information science, and engineering. This article, authored by a multidisciplinary group of scholars, probes the generative potential of infrastructure at this historical juncture. Accounting for the conceptual and material capacities of infrastructure, the article argues for the importance of paradox in understanding infrastructure. Thematically the article is organized around three key points that speak to the study of infrastructure: ruin, retrofit, and risk. The first paradox of infrastructure, ruin, suggests that even as infrastructure is generative, it degenerates. A second paradox is found in retrofit, an apparent ontological oxymoron that attempts to bridge temporality from the present to the future and yet ultimately reveals that infrastructural solidity, in material and symbolic terms, is more apparent than actual. Finally, a third paradox of infrastructure, risk, demonstrates that while a key purpose of infrastructure is to mitigate risk, it also involves new risks as it comes to fruition. The article concludes with a series of suggestions and provocations to view the study of infrastructure in more contingent and paradoxical forms.
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    Regulatory Translations: Expertise and Affect in Global Legal Fields
    (Indiana University Press, 2014) Türem, Ziya Umut; Ballestero, Andrea
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    The Power of the Personal: Science and Society in Postsocialist Czech Republic
    (2023-04-17) Lotterman, Charles; Georges, Eugenia; Ballestero, Andrea
    My dissertation centers around themes of trust and truth within the context of Czech science in order to, ultimately, join literature on the relation between liberalism, individualism, and empiricism. By depicting the ways that personal experiences figure into the production of scientific facts for my interlocutors, it shows how, in contrast with the normative ideal, conceptions of scientific objectivity can be constructed from appeals to subjectivity. Importantly, I ground my findings squarely within the anthropology of science, a literature that recognizes scientists and scientific inquiry as contingently and reciprocally swept up in social currents – in this case, those of a post-socialist, nascent liberal society. In doing so, my project offers a unique vantage toward Central Europe, a region that lays complexly within multiple junctures. I rewrite the narrative of the region, drawing strange parallels between socialist-era dissidents’ hopeful appeals for “living in truth,” and contemporary illiberal populists’ angry renunciation of expertise, for example. Locating my ethnographic findings within such contexts, my dissertation argues that liberalism’s multiple and conflicting meanings, from the agreement of a social contract to the celebration of liberty and the marketplace of ideas, blasts open space for a far greater range of practices than has been traditionally appreciated.
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    The Productivity of Nonreligious Faith: Openness, Pessimism, and Water in Latin America
    (SAR Press, 2012) Ballestero, Andrea; Tucker, Catherine M.
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    What is in a Percentage?: Calculation as the Poetic Translation of Human Rights
    (Indiana University Press, 2014) Ballestero, Andrea
    Increasingly, the efficacy of human rights, international norms, and commercial standards is deposited in numbers as measures of social and financial value. Taking the form of indicators, goals, and targets, these numbers are active participants in the everyday practices through which the law is constituted around the world. This paper examines the normative ability of percentages as numeric devices that transform measures of value across legal domains. The paper draws on two examples: a) the generation of indicators by NGOs promoting the Human Right to Water, and b) the technical work of regulators attempting to regulate water prices to follow the 3% affordability target that the United Nations advocates for. I argue that the process of translating human rights into numbers bestows rights with an afterlife that expands their reach into new domains. I also suggest that such process of translation is poetic and that exploring numbers and their role in lawmaking from a poetic point of view reveals the rich social lives that numbers lead. Attending more carefully to these numbers also shows the political possibilities that translation processes across genres of communication afford a philosophy of human rights preoccupied not only with their violation, but also with their implementation.