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About
I am a political anthropologist whose research examines energy security and ecological vulnerability in the global North through the analytic lenses of expertise, aesthetics, and futurity. Drawing on two decades of ethnographic fieldwork, I explore how expert performance and visuality shape environmental changes to land- and marine-based ways of life. I am Associate Professor of Social Anthropology at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), Research Affiliate with the Centre for Energy Ethics at the University of St Andrews, and Research Associate in the Department of Anthropology at SOAS University of London.
As a Visiting Senior Fellow, I recently completed the Routledge trilogy Inside the Energy Salon, a major thematic contribution examining expert performance as a central feature of late-liberal governance. Across three volumes, the project analyzes how energy futures become legible, investable, and morally persuasive within policy and investment networks, contributing to scholarship on value, affect, and the infrastructures through which expertise acquires authority. Together, the volumes form part of a broader research program on the cultural and political life of expertise in contemporary energy governance.
My edited volumes, Arctic Abstractive Industry: Assembling the Valuable and Vulnerable North and Subterranean Estates: Life Worlds of Oil and Gas, explore how ecological risk and economic promise are co-produced across heterogeneous social and material worlds. I am currently co-editing The Corridor of Impact (with Michael Watts), which reconceptualizes infrastructure corridors as dynamic socio-technical formations whose effects emerge through evolving processes of governance, expertise, and contestation.
I am also developing a new project, The Future of the Promenade: A Climate-Changed Form, which examines how climate change is reshaping the geography of leisure, public space, and urban planning through the northward migration of the beach promenade. Alongside this work, I am completing a methodological and visual book manuscript, Paparazzi Ethnography: An Anthropology of Surfaces and Curated Interactions, based on fieldwork supported by the US National Science Foundation, Fulbright Awards (Norway, Russia, and Canada), and the Wenner-Gren Foundation. Together, these projects examine how expertise, infrastructure, and environmental change shape emerging forms of energy and climate governance.
Books
Energy Images: Aesthetics of Resemblance and Form. Routledge, 2026
Consulting Energy: From Judgment to Decision-Making. Routledge, 2025
Energy Capitol: The Waning of Regulatory Form. Routledge, 2024
Arctic Abstractive Industry: Assembling the Valuable and Vulnerable North. Berghahn, 2022
Subterranean Estates: Life Worlds of Oil and Gas. Cornell University Press, 2016
Selected Public Writing
“Movement and Meaning for Oil and Gas Data Vendors.” Allegra Lab
“Advocating Slow Policy on Deep Sea Mining in the Svalbard Archipelago.” Beyond Hot Air
“Anthropology in Norway: Directions, Locations, Relations.” Norwegian Anthropology Journal
Research Areas
Energy expertise and governance; Arctic late industrialism and extractive futures; anthropology of surfaces and expert performance.