Jeffrey Banister

Jeffrey Banister is director of the Southwest Center as well as editor-in-chief and research social scientist.  He is also associate research professor in the School of Geography and Development.  As editor-in-chief of Journal of the Southwest, Banister has built on the university’s tradition of collaborative investigation and publication in the social and natural sciences and humanities with Mexican institutions. Much of this includes acquiring, translating, editing, and publishing scholarship from Mexican researchers in an effort to bring critical scholarship in and on Mexico into the English language bibliography.  His research and teaching focus primarily on water-resource governance and politics in the US-Mexico borderlands, Mexico, and Latin America. His most recent project explores the visual culture of water control and provision in Mexico City from the early to middle twentieth century. This is an interdisciplinary investigation of the Mexican capital’s large potable water system constructed at a crucial phase of national modernization.