Research Interests: Political economy, natural resource use, group identity, Latin America
Biography: Andrea’s was a member of POWG from 2010-2012, while she was obtaining her MA in Geography at UBC. Her research interests lie at the intersection of political economy, natural resource use/extraction, and land-based group identities. For her master’s thesis, Andrea examined community-managed water networks in periurban Cochabamba, Bolivia. She considered the merits and drawbacks of community water governance in relation to questions of autonomy, scale, and Bolivia’s putatively “post-neoliberal” turn.
Andrea is currently pursuing doctoral studies in Geography at the University of California-Berkeley, where her research has taken a somewhat new direction. Using a combination of ethnographic and archival methods, Andrea’s dissertation will explore the rise of cooperative mining in highland Bolivia. Cooperative mining, once marginal within Bolivian political economy, has come to play an increasingly dominant role in national politics, and Andrea’s research seeks to understand this phenomenon in historical and contemporary terms.
Andrea holds a Social Science and Humanities Research Council doctoral scholarship and is a 2014 Trudeau Scholar.
Publications:
Refereed Journal Articles
Marston, A.J. (2014) The Scale of Informality: Community-Run Water Systems in Peri-Urban Cochabamba, Bolivia. Water Alternatives 7(1), 72-88.
Marston, A.J. (In Press) Autonomy in a post-neoliberal era: Community water governance in Cochabamba, Bolivia. Special Issue: Not-Quite-Neoliberal Natures in Latin America. Geoforum. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2013.08.013
Marston, A. (2013) Justice for all? Material and semiotic impacts of Fair Trade craft certification. Geoforum 44, 162-169.
Publications In Progress
de Freitas, C., Marston, A.J., and Bakker, K. Not-Quite-Neoliberal Natures in Latin America. (In Progress) Introduction to special issue in Geoforum. In progress. (Second author, contribution 40%).