Paparazzi Ethnography

Catastrophic Events and High-Reliability Systems

11/9: One of our emerging projects at StudioPolar plans to explore the reliability of electricity grids in the Arctic. We can not help but notice that across the Arctic, from Fairbanks, Alaska, to Nuuk, Greenland, everyone lives in homes that are heated solely by electricity. No one knows the names or biographies of the technicians who run the local power plants and upon whose lives these communities depend. Even so, community members appear confident in the reliability of these ghost machines, so much so, that few residents consider back-up plans for an emergency situation (God forbid), in the case that power-stations shut down.

Karlene Roberts

We find two things remarkable about this condition: (1) someone, or some group of persons, working in the government housing and planning office decided one day, that there was enough reliability in electricity systems to approve building homes, in areas where temperatures range from 32 to -40 degrees fahrenheit for months on end, without any traditional mode of back-up heating, such as fuel-oil or wood stoves, and; (2) these really are reliable systems, and technicians in arctic communities do get up every morning and produce electricity, despite the fact that these regions are often talked about as high-risk for many occupations and lifestyles.

We also wonder, as an aside, and this is something we must resolve, why these technicians are not celebrated, and emerge as political and economic leaders of these communities, given the crucial role they perform in these societies. We became particularly aware of this in Nuuk, Greenland, where politicians garner quite a bit of local celebrity, including the premiums of vanity that are associated with their rule.

With these issues in mind, I was grateful to lunch today at the faculty club with Karlene Roberts, whose research over the past several decades concerns the evolution of large-scale technologies with high levels of operating reliability performance that are crucial to political legitimacy. Karlene received her PhD in Psychology from UC Berkeley, and after working at Stanford, became the first woman ever appointed to the Hass School of Business here at UC Berkeley. In fact, she has been a frequent collaborator with ERG’s Gene Rochlin and Todd LaPorte, a political scientist also at UC Berkeley.

There are so many research fields Karelene is working in at the moment, and which overlap with our own interests at StudioPolar, that the conversation was dizzying. Just to mention a few: she is actively engaged in UC Berkeley’s Center for Catastrophic Risk Management with which we plan to participate; also, she is working with members of Statoil, the Norwegian oil company, through their collaboration with UC Berkeley’s Center for Executive Education, and which is titled the Statoil Project Executive Program, or, in Statoil language, according to the company website, Project Academy. We plan to follow up on all of these links and will report back in updates on our NSF EAGER research.