Practicar el asombro: Una entrevista con Andrea Ballestero alrededor de su libro “Una Historia Futura del Agua”.

Andrea Ballestero is an associate professor of anthropology at Rice University in Houston. Her work seeks to understand the relationship between ethics and technology in spaces where it is impossible to separate reality into compartments delimited by disciplinary divisions. Thus, she has focused on understanding practices in which legal, economic, and techno-scientific aspects merge, shaping what is possible in the world, but also opening everyday spaces for the expression of ethical aspirations for the future. In recent years, she has focused on studying water in its many forms, following it from aquifers to bureaucratic spaces where its future is decided.  His first book, A Future History of Water, explores how distinctions between water as a fundamental right and water as a commodity are constantly produced. Based on fieldwork with state officials, activists, and politicians in Costa Rica and Brazil, the book revolves around four technical artifacts: a formula, an index, a list, and a pact. Using wonder as a methodological lens, the book explores the ways in which these artifacts carry inscribed possibilities for the future, even as they appear to replicate structures of the present.