Andrea Muehlebach

My current book project (under contract, Duke UP) explores the politics of water financialization and re-municipalization in austerity-era Europe. It does so from the vantage point of the political, legal, and ethical struggles people wage as they seek to protect water as a public good or commons. Here, I am not only fascinated by the financialization of infrastructures, public-private partnerships, and the continuing reconfiguration and evacuation of “the public,” but by the new forms of political and legal imagination that are taking root as people attempt to reclaim ownership over water. These kinds of topics have a profound urgency at a moment where the interlocking crises of capitalism, democracy, and the environment have become more apparent than ever before.

I am delighted to expand my expertise in the anthropology of water to include the oceans, specifically with a project on sand mining and another on the North Sea. For more information on these and other interests (which include mountains and ice, rights of nature, and popular struggles against bottled water plants, but also questions of welfare and state benevolence, neoliberal refigurations of the public and of citizenship, and the ethics and politics of economic life) see https://www.andreamuehlebach.com/