The Central Cordillera of the Colombian Andes is one of the most seismically active places in the world and receives high annual rainfall, making it especially susceptible to mudslides. Using environmental anthropology and feminist science studies approaches, I study how historically produced forms of endangerment are experienced and contested by mudslide survivors, construction workers, scientists, politicians, and activists. My dissertation focuses on mudslides in Colombia as historically significant events that are entwined with land distribution, the peace process, and justice in the wake of more than fifty years of armed conflict. I conducted 18 months of ethnographic field research in Manizales, a small city in the Central Cordillera of the Colombian Andes, where campesinos (peasants) who were fleeing violence in the countryside during the 1950s and 1960s settled informally on mudslide-prone land. Now, their descendants continue to be displaced by mudslides. I examine how their experiences have influenced and been shaped by disagreements between state and citizen scientists regarding the most effective techniques, materials, designs, and technologies for preventing mudslides. In my dissertation, I argue that the various engineering practices developed to control moving earth also engineer politics by alternately opening or closing possibilities for people displaced by war to safely inhabit mudslide-prone land.Civil engineering is the usual, state-sponsored approach to preventing mudslides, and involves building large, concrete retention walls. Installing these walls preventively would be too expensive for the state, so they are often built where mudslides have already happened. Due to their large size and design, these walls also prevent people from settling where they are built, perpetuating displacement. In search of alternative solutions, mudslide survivors with whom I worked circumvented the state by forming alliances with an activist group of citizen scientists and residents who called themselves the Grupo de Bioingeniería (GB). They propose ecological engineering (or bioingeniería), which includes using bamboo to create small retention walls. They contend that this engineering technique is affordable enough to be used preventively and allows people to build their houses where bamboo walls are installed. Drawing on authors who work to undo the separation between geology on one hand and social, political, and biological life on the other (Clark and Szerszynski 2021; Povinelli 2016), I argue that the GB’s proposal is to engineer politics as much as mountains by addressing historically produced forms of endangerment and, perhaps, creating conditions for justice by expanding access to land. In Colombia, which has the most unequal land distribution in the world with more than two thirds of agricultural land in the hands of less than 1% of farmland owners, the state predicates provisioning a common, economic good on the wrong distribution of land. This common good is based on what Jacques Rancière calls “a wrong”: the inclusion of people displaced by war in the terms of the common good as its beneficiaries, at the same time as their own terms are not counted, such that they have no part in anything (1999: 9). This wrong distribution results in their exclusion because they are left without stable land on which to live. By challenging hierarchies of scientific knowledge, members of the GB seek environmental justice that opens the possibility for people displaced by war to safely inhabit mudslide-prone, urban land, thus imagining land distribution and occupation otherwise.

This dissertation is based on five years of fieldwork with the UC Davis Vector Genetics Laboratory in Davis California. Following particularly their collaboration with a University of California consortium project led by UC Irvine, it is focused on the laboratory’s contribution to the project of creating the first open-field trial of genetically modified organisms bearing gene drives, a genetic element which alters patterns of genetic inheritance. These organisms are a version of the Anopheles gambiae mosquito, which is the main African vector of malaria. That disease continues to kill nearly half a million people on that continent every year, most of them children. Even with the very recent introduction of a possible vaccine, with only about 30% effectiveness, the project is premised on the conclusion that existing prevention and treatment efforts are, and will continue to be, inadequate. The research team believes that this project, if it progresses to implementation on continental Africa, has the potential to eliminate malaria. The Vector Genetics Laboratory has been tasked with undertaking the fieldwork portion of this project, or bringing organisms and phenomena demonstrated in the laboratory to fruition in the world. This text highlights a simple point which has nevertheless been neglected in most conversations around gene drives and similar genetic engineering projects. The trial, like some others using similar technologies, depends on the manipulation of existing populations and their reproductive networks. This new mode of controlling living organisms is offered as a more elegant and effective way to change other living beings in the world. Rather than doing things to them, we have them do them to each other. Gene drives are perhaps the clearest example of this strategy, and it is widely recognized that this opens up new possibilities for the manipulation of living beings. I argue here, however, that this strategy also re-theorizes ideas of control in practice, and scrambles existing discourses about novelty and change through what it does to sexual reproduction. While we tend to think of the new mosquito as the novel element of the equation, my fieldwork shows that it does not figure centrally in the planning of an open field trial. That is because it is not very likely to do a new or unexpected thing all on its own. The crux of this new technology is that it intervenes at the point of reproduction—the space where the researchers anticipate they may be surprised, where something unpredictable may happen, is at this sexual interface between laboratory mosquito and wild-type. Because they know a great deal about the former, but very little about the latter, it is in the wild half of this equation that attention is centered. This matters for the kinds of stories we are building around this and other projects using gene drives. Because this is likely to be the first use of the technology outside the laboratory, its outcome carries tremendous consequences for future uses, both planned and as-yet unimagined. I argue that implementation, far from being after-the-fact, is actually the main event. The project is not the mosquito; it is what the mosquito can do with the world. Investigations of mosquito worlds, thus, take on a new and greater significance: they are not the passive ground upon which change is enacted, but active doers catalyzed in a particular way by sex.

In 2016, an association of Peruvian banks launched a mobile money platform, Bim, announcing it as a tool for financial inclusion. Aligned with the World Bank’s goal of ‘universal financial access by 2020’ and with Peru’s National Financial Inclusion Strategy, Bim promised to provide access to financial services for the seventy percent of ‘unbanked’ Peruvians living in so-called informal cash economies –while generating profits for the banks. Based on extensive fieldwork with engineers, bank representatives, marketers, development consultants, state bureaucrats and shop-to-shop promoters involved in the design and daily operation of this mobile money platform, my research traces the heterogeneous communities of experts co-producing mobile money as both a financial technology for expanding finances in Peru, and as a development model that designs the ‘unbanked populations’ it seeks to engage. By peering into the practices of these experts, my dissertation examines the specific contours of the financial-development network they promised to build and integrate, and the extent to which it mirrors and extends older microfinance practices, further capitalizing on the resources of people living at the margins of more fully banked economies rather than opening new possibilities through the democratization of money as ‘digital cash.’ Rather than a top-down story on how capitalism always wins, my account focuses on the vibrant life occurring within this evolving techno-financial wave. I pay close attention to the tensions and controversies among the various sets of experts involved (bankers, state regulators, engineers implementing the technology), and to the day-to-day economies of small shops that these financial interventions aim to transform. On different scales, both shopkeepers and experts are figuring out how to navigate these money transformations, grappling with the potential future directions that their actions might open or foreclose.

This dissertation is an ethnographic study of pasture-cheesemaking in Kars, Northeastern Turkey, amid politicized boundaries and transnational connections. It investigates cheesemaking within the larger agro-pastoral worlds molded by the everyday practices of animal care, dairy crafts, and technosciences, and regulated by the nation-state politics of food safety and national security. Focusing on a farmers’ association in a village in Kars, I question the ways in which pasture-cheesemaking enabled farmers to organize for “a better life” for their more-than-human community. Cheesemaking is not a mere economic opportunity or a milestone industry; it is also a process through which local communities can reimagine places to make a better life in a depopulated village in rural Turkey. Throughout the dissertation, I explore how cheese has become an unexpected agent to remember the shared violent past and circumvent the spatiality of state and ethnopolitical boundaries, while it also makes new places, communities, and technosciences through material practices of composing archives, doing scientific research and sustaining dairy production in Northeastern Turkey. I approach cheesemaking from practices that precede and remain as the underpinning of the dairy craft, namely mera hayvancılığı (agro-pastoralism) and processes of arranging pastures for dairy production. I focus on two kinds of trademark cheeses of Kars: gravyer and kaşar. I argue that appropriating the Swiss cheesemaking heritage of the early 20th century as Boğatepe Gravyer cheese and composing the archive of cheesemaking in the village ecomuseum entailed place-making through reconfiguration of dairy arrangements in the everyday practices of agro-pastoral livelihoods in Boğatepe pastures. By analyzing a nascent collaboration between small farmers, cheesemakers, and a group of dairy scientists engaged in the Geographical Indication certification process of Kars Kaşar cheese, I argue that the collaborative efforts have been challenging the Pasteurization procedures imposed by the industrial dairy standards, and “pasturing” the dairy arrangements of kaşar cheesemaking in the last fifteen years. Lastly, I investigate the dynamics of the collaboration between cheesemakers and scientists. I suggest that this collaboration entailed pasture-cheese diplomacy, which not only obliged scientists to question the conventional approaches in dairy science research on traditional cheeses but also paved the way for new technoscientific interventions that would ensure crafting pastures into cheeses.

Coral coverage reduction of up to 90% became a barometer of planetary health in the last three decades. As a result, coral scientists anticipate coral extinction with catastrophic effects on life in the oceans and propose direct interventions to rehabilitate ecological functions and extend corals’ lives. Some scholars have offered a critical approach to coral restoration’s naturalization of corporate forms of responsibility (Moore 2018) and controversies among coral scientists about what coral restoration can achieve (Braverman 2018). My dissertation draws upon twenty months of immersive study as a volunteer for the Center of Research, Education, and Recreation (CEINER) in the Rosario archipelago (part of the Corals of Rosario and San Bernardo Nature Reserve). CEINER simultaneously works on coral restoration and the assisted reproduction of endangered fish species. In addition, I volunteered for other coral restoration and reef checks in Isla Fuerte, Santa Marta, Taganga, and San Andrés. I also attended and presented posters and papers at international conferences on conservation biology, coral science, and ecological restoration. My work with scientists and other residents and visitors in the Rosario archipelago has pushed my analysis beyond extinction’s recognition to consider the migration of coral and fish further and deeper in the ocean. Using the word “migrations,” I intend to reframe the terms of destruction from planetary accounts to elusive ecologies—for both scientists and artisanal fishers. I explore different and co-incidental sea compositions, undecidable temporal horizons in coral reproductive urgencies, and more ways through which various islanders grow coral and fish in this sea. My research conceptually integrates and advances discussions surrounding extinction, managerial juridical frameworks, and environmental and animal studies. Throughout my dissertation, I build a vocabulary to think and imagine affective sea ecologies and unlikely, partial, and strategic collaborations among coral restoration scientists and other islanders.