Dean Chahim is a second-year doctoral student in the Department of Anthropology at Stanford University. His dissertation project focuses on how engineers, communities, and elites in Mexico City come to believe and at times resist the notion that the megalopolis can and should continue to grow despite a glaring water crisis. In his ethnographic and archival research, he plans to examine the role of engineers in translating impossible political demands into technically justifiable plans. He attempts to juxtapose this research with a broader investigation of how engineering projects render the environmental consequences of urban growth distant, and cause them to diffuse in space and time. Before beginning graduate studies, he obtained a SBcE in Civil and Environmental Engineering, and a self-designed BA in International Development & Social Change from the University of Washington. Upon graduation, he received a fellowship to travel independently across the global South for eight months. He later worked in Seattle as an environmental engineer on the clean-up of industrial pollutants, and volunteered as an organizer with low-wage Latino workers fighting against wage theft. He continues to organize with local community organizations and is involved in Stanford’s fossil fuel divestment movement.