CNS Seminar (In-house)

Thursday, November 14, 2013
2:00-4:00 pm
Girvetz 2320
Speaker: 
Casey Walsh

Casey Walsh is Associate Professor of Anthropology at UCSB.  His research interests include water and commodity production in Mexico and California.  Among his recent publications on these topics are Building the Borderlands (Texas A&M, 2008), and articles in Ecosphere (2013) and Human Organization (2011).

Casey Walsh will give a talk entitled: "Filtering Out the Social: Nanotechnology and Water Treatment in Mexico."

In this talk I discuss the role of nanotechnology in infrastructures  that manage water quality in Mexico.   Faced with serious contamination problems in both surface and subsoil water sources, social movements that demand environmental justice, and extreme economic and technical difficulties in assuring water quality through conventional means, hopes have turned to new technologies that treat water at the nano scale. The case of the contamination of Rio Santiago by landfill leachates in Guadalajara, Mexico, is considered.