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Instabilities: an Ethnography of Mexican Earth and Expertise
- Reddy, Elizabeth Anne
- Advisor(s): Maurer, William
Abstract
The deadly Mexican earthquake disaster of 1985 still looms in personal and institutional
memory and makes credible seismic threats still to come. Earthquake early warning
technologies, developed in its wake, have implications for not only publics at risk and the
distribution of power and authority among experts in the seismic community, but, finally,
for what Foucault has called the security apparatus of the Mexican state.
In this dissertation, I explore the relations between earthquakes and technoscientific
knowledge when public welfare is at stake. I argue that as the disparate experts of the
seismic community of Mexico and around the world develop and debate earthquake early
warning technologies, they make geophysical energies moving through the material world
meaningful. With careful attention to the everyday meaningful imbrications of geological
and social worlds and the forces, practices, tools, ideas, and institutions which constitute
them garnered through research methods including participant observation, surveys,
interviews, and archival research, I investigate how expert work and seismicity, both
importantly unstable, produce the conditions of possibility for political encounters with the
moving earth.
Main Content
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