Ashley Carse (NHC Fellow, 2024–25)

Ashley Carse is a cultural anthropologist focused on the intersection of culture, technology, and ecology. He has carried out long-term, community-based fieldwork in Panama, the southeastern United States, and, increasingly, along transnational transportation networks. Across these locations, he uses ethnographic and historical methods to study infrastructure projects (water systems, roads, canals, ports, etc.) as sites where communities debate priorities and make value-laden decisions about how the benefits and burdens of economic development will be distributed among people and ecologies.

His first project explored the implications of remaking nature as infrastructure. The resulting book, Beyond the Big Ditch: Politics, Ecology, and Infrastructure at the Panama Canal (MIT 2014), recasts the story of the iconic waterway from its rural margins. It shows how the reorganization of the surrounding watershed as an infrastructure to optimize the fresh water supply used to move ships between the seas transformed Panamanian landscapes and livelihoods. Since then, he has written extensively about infrastructure and society, including publications on the history of the infrastructure concept, water politics, time and temporality, and maritime worlds. As an NHC Fellow, he will work on a book that tells the story of how an average harbor deepening project in Savannah, Georgia, became a billion-dollar environmental mitigation megaproject that spanned an entire region. Through the story of Savannah, the book examines broader tensions inherent in an approach to environmental management that seeks to control environmental impacts by expanding the scope of technological interventions—by building more, rather than less.

Read more about his research and read publications at ashleycarse.com.

Selected Publications

• Carse, Ashley. “The Ecobiopolitics of Environmental Mitigation: Remaking Fish Habitat through the Savannah Harbor Expansion Project.” Social Studies of Science 51, no. 4 (2021): 512–37.
• Carse, Ashley, and David Kneas. “Unbuilt and Unfinished: The Temporalities of Infrastructure.” Environment and Society: Advances in Research 10, no. 1 (2019): 9–28.
• Carse, Ashley. “Keyword: Infrastructure.” In Infrastructures and Social Complexity: A Routledge Companion, edited by Penny Harvey, Casper Bruun Jensen, and Atsuro Morita, 27–39. London and New York: Routledge, 2017.
• Carse, Ashley. Beyond the Big Ditch: Politics, Ecology, and Infrastructure at the Panama Canal. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2014.
• Carse, Ashley. “Nature as Infrastructure: Making and Managing the Panama Canal Watershed.” Social Studies of Science 42, no. 4 (2012): 539–63.