RESEARCH SEMINAR: Mallory James
Speakers: Mallory James, Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich
"Storage is a Resource": Complicit Knowledge-Work and a Liberal Ethics of Energy in Australian Carbon Capture and Storage
Abstract: Carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology is framed as compensating for the climate damage of coal, hydrogen, oil, or gas use by preventing carbon dioxide from escaping into the earth’s atmosphere. As a family of actual and potential climate change mitigation strategies, CCS requires paid expert labor for its research, engineering, and communication. Professional services of discussing and considering how to remediate pollution and other industrial harms are thereby positioned as saleable economic activities for climate repair—even if carried out in active partnership with new extractive projects. How can anthropology account for the dynamics of distraction, relabeling, and complicity that emerge alongside Australian CCS knowledge-worker practices?
Tacking between the political economy of Australia’s research sector and the political ecology of how engineering constructs its objects, this presentation diffracts (Barad 2014) the notions of resource that underpin two key relationships visible within a 2013 to 2018 ethnographic study of Eastern Australian CCS. I describe how carbon storage geologies are made into a resource, and engage with analytics of capture to describe how knowledge workers become entangled with the CCS industry. Attending to the production of these relationships demands a heuristic awareness outside of what “energy ethics” (High & Smith 2019) currently offers as an anthropological research agenda. I conclude by describing how the intellectual traditions that have led us to take “energy ethics” as a research paradigm appear to contain assumptions characteristic of political liberalism; and speculate on whether and how complicity remains thinkable outside of such assumptions.
Barad, K. (2014). "Diffracting diffraction: Cutting together-apart." parallax 20, no. 3: 168-187
Dunlap, A., J. Verweijen and C. Tornel (2024). "The political ecologies of "green" extractivism(s): An introduction " Journal of Political Ecology 31(1): 436-463.
High, Mette. M., & Smith, Jessica. M. 2019. Introduction: The ethical constitution of energy dilemmas. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 25(S1), 9-28.
Hughes, D. M. (2017). Energy without conscience: oil, climate change, and complicity. Durham, Duke University Press.
Dr. Mallory James
Visiting Scientist
Institute for European Ethnology and Cultural Analysis
Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich
https://www.en.ekwee.uni-muenchen.de/staff/visiting-scientists/mallory-james/index.html
https://www.linkedin.com/in/mallory-james-chicago/
Biography: Mallory James is an anthropologist whose work centers upon engineering studies, political economy, and the social studies of energy. Her investigations have bridged an interest in knowledge-workers’ inner experiences of appropriate practice with a concern for their historically, nationally, financially, and institutionally specific circumstances. Currently affiliated as a Visiting Scientist at the Institute for European Ethnology and Cultural Analysis of the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, Mallory is developing a book project provisionally titled "Greenwishing: An Ethnography of Carbon Capture and Storage" regarding the meanings of responsible engineering attributed to Australian carbon and energy engineering. In previous work at the Technical University of Munich, she investigated the practices by which scholars construct and demonstrate scientific “excellence” while applying for European research funding, thereby exploring how institutionalized funding conditions shape scientific subjectivity and practical reasoning.