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About
I am a political anthropologist specializing in the study of Energy security and ecological vulnerability in the global North; Energy expertise, aesthetics, and futurity; and Adverse impacts of climate change for land and marine ecosystems, as well as local ways of life. I have been conducting fieldwork in the global North for two decades, working with consultants, political leaders, lobbyists, and local representatives across the Arctic. My publications focus on the anthropologies of extractive industry, futurity, and expertise, linked to STS-related genealogies. I hold a permanent position as Associate Professor in the Institute for Social Anthropology at Norwegian University of Science and Technology, and a Research Affiliate position with the Centre for Energy Ethics at University of St Andrews.
As Visiting Senior Fellow, I am completing an energy politics themed trilogy for Routledge titled Inside the Energy Salon. The three books mark an intervention in expert performances through which futures are made legible and valuable within elite policy and investment networks. The effort resonates with recent scholarship on late liberalism, value regimes, and the affective promise of infrastructure. The trilogy offers an anthropology of surfaces or what I call an elaborate cultivation of surface appearance that is central to the moral economy of elite knowledge worlds. Separately, I have edited two volumes titled Arctic Abstractive Industry: Assembling the Valuable and Vulnerable North and Subterranean Estates: Life Worlds of Oil and Gas, both of which consider diverse engagements in resource extraction and ecological vulnerability.
I am currently developing the edited volume project Mapping the Corridor of Impact: Affects and Pathways of Energy Transportation (with Michael Watts and Caura Wood). My funded visiting positions include the Department of Anthropology at Rice University; Energy and Resources Group at University of California Berkeley; and Department of Anthropology at University of Calgary. Support for my research has come from the US National Science Foundation; Wenner-Gren Foundation; S.V. Ciriacy-Wantrup Fellowship; and the European Research Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellowship.
Inside the Energy Salon
Volume I Energy Capitol: The Waning of Regulatory Form
Volume II Consulting Energy: From Judgment to Decision-Making (with a Foreword by Dominic Boyer)
Volume III Energy Images: Aesthetics of Resemblance and Form (available 2026).
Recent blog posts
Movement and Meaning for Oil and Gas Data Vendors. Allegra Lab
Advocating Slow Policy on Deep Sea Mining in the Svalbard Archipelago: Reflections on the Making Use of Arctic Science Workshop. Beyond Hot Air
En Bærekraftig Fremtid for Svalbard. Svalbardposten
Anthropology in Norway: Directions, Locations, Relations. Norway Anthropology Journal
Assembling the Valuable and Vulnerable North. Society for Cultural Anthropology
Anthropology of Fleeting Phenomena. Paparazzi Ethnography
Making Use of Arctic Science. StudioPolar
Expertise
The Anthropocene; Anthropology of Surfaces, Energy Expertise; Neo-Aristocracy; Arctic Late Industrialism.