3-day programme

Epilogue: The course provided exposure to approaches for working out the status of knowledge. One approach was tactical in the form of three exercises. In these exercises, students took on vantage points to situate themselves in relationship to the subject of knowledge:

We actively manipulated the position of the subject: Aase Tveito appeared to us initially in the form of a lecturer on the topic of knowledge sharing in the Arctic. Soon, we transformed her into an informant who was responsive to the practice of science production. That is, she appeared to us as someone who creates lectures intended for consumption outside of Tromsø.

Finally, she makes an appearance as the irreducible nucleus of know-how — in the somewhat ambiguous and ambivalent role of “bare life”. In this role, Aase Tveito exists at the core of an otherwise continuous layering of concentric circles of practice where expertise is that which is endowed with legitimacy in the form of the “political life” of the subject.

Students imitated a subject of knowledge: Each identified with one of the lecturers, and in so doing, took on the anthropology of the subject. They spoke on behalf of a lecturer, and thus momentarily became both spokesperson and embodiment of knowledge (the latter, in the way Vidar Hepsø speaks of embodying “terrain”).

They explained themselves, by a combination of description and performance, e.g., a quote — that was then further analyzed to explore the constitution of commitment. By the end, we identified various positions that lecturers had to their object all within reach of analysis by way of a discussion about distance, authenticity, agency, ethics.

Finally, we participated in a dividing practice, placing some lecturers in the position of data acquisition and others in knowledge dissemination: In the former, we could see how the descriptions of lecturers, their intimacy to data collection, provided a specific course of development — passing from (self-confident) ignorance, to self-reflective consultation, and finally, to genuine understanding (e.g., the hero’s journey narrative). In cases of the latter, students presented themselves as subjects of knowledge. On the last day, we offered specific critiques of presentations revolving around some concept of distance, for example, in direct relationship to the experience of emotion (fear).

We further characterized distance in the testimony of Gunhild Hoogensen Gjørv who demonstrates that audience reception provides contexts for conviction as well as the possible erosion of distance between subject and object of knowledge.

A second approach in the course was analytical and accessible through various presentations surrounding the conditions of knowledge production. For example, Vidar Hepsø demonstrated that the “realism” of photography is deceptive of “real” conditions of the oil reservoir, while abstractions that amplify conditions generate authenticity, that is, abstractions bring the subject closer to the condition of interest (predictability, oil extraction).

We then reformulated this dichotomy between realism and abstraction into a generalized framework for considering expertise more generally, in terms of a distinction (without graduation) in the forms of the Kantian and anti-Kantian aesthetic — the former tending toward a rejection of representations of the obvious in favor of principles of the esoteric, and the latter, a preference for the sensual, immediate, and obvious.

Abstractions, we argued facetiously, thus, become preferential, as a classifying scheme, resulting in a population explosion of images that do not make sense on their surface, appearing in all manner of locations where experts live and work, e.g., “artwork” in diplomatic estates, bathrooms, office buildings (receptions, canteens), hotels where conference presentation take place.

Important: the erosion of authenticity in each of our examples is a result of greater realism which is understood as providing less visibility of the real conditions (photography does not allow access to understanding the oil reservoir). However, as I demonstrated, authenticity and expertise is based on an opposing pattern. The more ostentatious the conditions of expertise (that is, the less abstract know-how appears to us), the more likely it can emerge as expertise.

The power elite no longer consists of CEOs and politicians, but powerful experts who sit side-by-side with the traditional power elite (whose names are CEO and Politician). I demonstrated that expertise is taking place in wealthy locations, secured environments, surrounded by conspicuous forms of glamour, leisure, etc. And importantly, while knowledge has evolved toward ever increasing forms of abstraction, expertise has moved toward increasing forms of realism in status-recognition, as a form of conspicuous assertions of its authority.


Additional notes taken from speakers:

3/8:

Downloadable pdf of 3-day programme

3/7 Afternoon session: Elena Parmiggiani is up now talking on environmental modeling, production fields on the continental shelf. Each oil well has its own personality  — “a patient” —  Information infrastructure (collection of information from different sources + intelligent distribution towards heterogeneous disciplines) or rather… shared, open heterogenous, evolving socio-technical system. New players — environment as primary actor, mobilization of expert institutions… Problem: investigate how global information infrastructure is established locally, so that it is both meaningful at the local (stakeholders) and yet retains the global system it represents. The standard. And we have a response from Robert Pijpers – draws attention of technologies to agency, then a couple of questions… installation on sea, operated remotely connected.

Kathrine Tveiterås — reacts to Elena, commenting about awareness of interactions among informants and appreciates extraction from coordinated sites, and wants to know what will happen in these different translation moments. Simplifications are required, but something is happening to what is being monitored, and how things will deliver meaning at a later stage. Sidsel Saugestad. What is the paper connected to this course about? Elena wants to wait for the end of the lecture to find out what.

Lena Gross. The good life and the oil industry. Beginning with slides from the Athabasca country. “Lac La Biche”. Statoil– a relatively new actor in the region, ethical oil company, with an office in Calgary. Steam assisted gravity drainage. Concepts of value. How flexible should folks in the region be about development in the region. The concept of trust, continuity, property (who has the right to decide what happens to the land). Concepts of the neoliberal state when corporations step in and provide social services (schools, etc.).

Robert Pijpers. Knowledge Worlds: Sierra Leone. Social economic changes triggered by land investments in rural areas. Land grabbing to produce food, fuels. “Land Acquisition” — very large scale and high capital. History (10 year civil war, ended in 2002). Provinces and Cheifdoms. Parallel governing systems. Centralized systems with decentralized offices. Chiefly system, charismatic authority. Folks making claims at different authorities, “window shopping” testing whether government of chiefly authority has an advantage. Involves personal exchanges, because technological communication is limited.

Glen Smith. Marine Planning in Scotland — the Slightly Lower North. Dissolving boundaries — who knows? how do they know? and who cares? Project background–A lesson in Three Letter Abbreviations (TLAs). Marine Scotland Act 2010: Marine planning, Licensing, Conservation, Seal Conservation, Enforcement, Sea Fisheries. National Marine Plan (NMP): soon to be adopted 2014: develop national and regional marine plans, create marine protected areas. List of groupings surrounding off shore regions. To big to plan in a meaningful way. 1. Membership of marine planning  (who can know)”what the nominee can offer in terms of relevant expertise, skills, knowledge….” 2. Making and using maps (how to know the seas). Internalization as control. Reputational Risk; Dissolving Boundaries– The resource becomes definable, they become experts, democratic principles.

Luciano do valle Garotti — Flow of resources for rigs permeate different sectors with different logics. Moving materials. Utilize, maximize capacity of cargo. Conflict of different sectors. Integrated Operation Initiatives — integration, interaction of logics. What is this collaborative work? Characterize this collaboration. Different assemblages coming together.

Onshore-Offshore; Onshore logistic teams; Onshore logistic-drilling teams. Should they be real planning? Materials for wells, materials for the rigs, backload, transshipment, water or diesel, food. Who is responsible, what gives a logistics team its logic? Assemblages — first team, better results, mature, national interaction, variability. Unpredictable, different types of activities coming together, requiring different kinds of material synchronizations, temporal synchronizations, Labor synchronizations.

Assemblies of different types of synchronization. Material synchronizations overlapping with temporal and labor synchronizations. And these synchronizations are oriented toward achieving particular aims. One might say assemblies of different assemblies of synchronizations.

Contact points — Tasks– consolidate, prioritize, expediting.

Need to ask yourself what role these different objects play. Why do they fascinate you? What does this process fascinate you? Some paths become flow. Complexity involved in creating an appearance of flow.

3/7: Second day–up now, Gunhild Gjørv, providing an impressive background of her International Polar Year and other funded projects, along with other activities in extractive industries.

Security, the individual and the state. Develops a concept of security that focuses on the individual level, referring to Bentham, security of expectations (present and future). What is so important that we are willing to defend into the future. Prioritizing certain ideas for the purpose of ensuring — security. Borders remain intact even in failed states. But populations are disciplined differently. In the 1990s, human security began to emerge in policy. Security has multiple meanings depending on the level (individual, society, state) depending on the context.

Security as a normative term, is a positive notion. The role of the state.

Up now is Maaike Knol. Planning at the interface of science and politics. Giving us a background on the Norwegian Continental Shelf. Management plans. Valuable areas, vulnerable areas. Boundary Instrastructure of particularly valuable and vulnerable areas. Creating maps for the basis of a political process.

The co-production of science and political objects. Mapping practices redirect the controversy to a more political process. The message of impact assessment: Low probability outweighs consequences. Message of the Petroleum Directorate. Management plan: “too little knowledge to conclude on consequences.” Marine scientists: “the conventional risk model is unsuitable”.

There is no ultimate risk reality. Different assessment practices (methods) lead to multiple realities — wider understanding of risk is needed, that includes different forms of expertise, allows for multiple realities embedded within knowledge cultures, dissolves the boundary between facts and values. Before an object is made governable, it needs to be made readable and measurable (implies categorization and classification). Scientists and experts help enact realties. They become the spokespersons of nature. Creation of boundary infrastructures for environmental governance.

Long-term governance transformation and the governance of contradictions: a) Expectation of development and progress (planning to realize) b) Expectations about unintended consequences and possible damage (planning to avoid).

(1) By analyzing the potential solidness and durability of constructed knowledge/expertise, the social scientist takes part in this process of co-production; (2) Thereby, we are also part of shaping the world that we (wish to) live in; (3) What does that imply for our work.

Methods of assessment equate to the basis of values.

AFTER LUNCH:

Peter Stuart. Begins exactly on the point that we wanted to hear, by speaking of the transition away from and contemporary ignorance of Marx, as “relatively unknown” and “thoroughly understood”. Materialist view is the liberalist view (individuals continually seeking gain, astonishingly remorseless in seeking material gain). The process of making goods, what happens when you get together to make things, organizing, partnerships, and in organizing ourselves we are creating fairly obvious social relationships and ones that may change as the way we produce goods changes. The condition of post-modernity – disorganization of production.

Internalization of means-ends thinking. Normalization of forms, related to the way things are organized.

Tips from a new PhD — Problems of Access. Kathrine Tveiterås. Talking now about reflexive practices of relationships with informants and in the field.  (1) If you cannot study inside out, study outside in (define where you are “on the outside” — all the particular location of where you are) — within the process of research, identify informants themselves as capable of disciplining the researcher; (2) Snowballing, moving more toward the object, by becoming more competent and efficient through the controlled observation itself; (3) Avoid performing what you know in order to obtain what the informant knows; (4) Keep levels flat — lift micro levels up and lower macro levels down (flatten things out).

Vidar Hepsø. Working inside a corporate company. No automatic access (computer systems, documents), some of the data becomes available indirectly. Insider by Degree (studying computer engineers, crane operator) — able to study but never be an integral part of the community. When you do meaningful interaction in a community of practice, communities want you to do meaningful work. They give and you give. Exchange of information.A shift from planning to scenarios and foresights. Conceived as such.

Caught in a social field of questions of allegiance and identity. Questions of ethics, neutrality versus interest. Company allegiance — how are you able to combine your role of critical researcher with complying to the standards of the company. Academic allegiance (Making social science matter 2001). Phronetic Anthropology (Fourth question –what can we do with it).

Maaike Knol. Networking tips for case study research. Contacts, informants, a lot of data: (1) Go out and do it (even if it doesn’t feel comfortable) — getting out there even when you feel you are not prepared, without full oversight of the problem, with deliverables to return; (2) Become familiar with the research site; (3) Be flexible. A dynamic project requires dynamic methods; (4) Be guided by content and quality.

3/6: Okay. I gave my introductory comments. Up now is Vidar Hepsø, looking intelligent, moving from nature to culture — to recreate nature through expertise. Title of paper is Conjuring the oil and gas reservoir through socio-material practices.

Showing us images of geological details, writing down, over view of geological structures (in Greenland) — demonstrating how field practices in geology are embodied practices. Climbing, searching, walking. Now in the office. Everything that is embodied and real is re-presented as tools. In the field, the body is an escapable reference point for knowledge. In the office, representation becomes the most important aspect of discovery. Going on field trips is about the “art of becoming” a geologists. Cannot be a geologist without actually having field experience.

The Analogue: It is possible to identify the geological structure under the ocean (on the Norwegian shelf at 3000 meter depth) — above the ocean in Greenland. The development of heuristic devices for constructing analogy. Depicting similarity between stones. One accessible from drilling a well, and another from walking along Greenland. The embodied experience (walking along the hillside) provides intuition to the subsea context — cannot be separated from each other. But in addition to embodied experience, there is helicopter view, and satellite view.

Wow. That’s great!

What he demonstrates is that in the field, the instruments used are completely traditional, hammer, eye glass, pen — and the body is the reference point for its relationship to landscape but also to the body. Sketching. Simplified sketch in draw book. If we use photography, we will lose some of the biggest patterns (meaning, interest). It is visual intelligence. Moving between scales and perspectives. Back at the office, they work with a multidisciplinary team. These tools used, have amplification and reduction practices. Visualization technologies (microscope, amplifying and hiding) — the more hermeneutic they are, the more you have to be trained to capture the object (Weak-Strong program Ihde 1999).

Representing an understanding of porosity and permeability. Of field trips. They translate the terrain, not into a naturalistic picture, but into an abstract eidetic image, representing it through the professional vision of the geological episteme. Simulacrum of the reservoir.

Okay. Up Now is Kathrine Tveiterås. Beginning with Bacalao metaphor. Speaking of Snøvit, requiring different types of knowledge and expertise — a question of composition. Looking for different ways to calibrate and coordinate these different types. You need a development solution, and existing infrastructure enabling the development. Titled, Investment analyses as expertise – economizing Snøhvit LNG. 

Market access — is it profitable? Mega project, is it socially acceptable. Organization– how do we decide? A number of interests and perceptions involved into a project. Net Present Value, becomes an equation for governing over an answer, which then could be backcasted on the project itself. So the NPV forecasts an answer, and then the answer governs what must be extracted from the empirical. Starts out as a representation tool, but then becomes an agency tool, offering insight on what needs to be done. The calculation is able to make a decision. Stands in as a surrogate for progress and deliverables.

Peter Arbo up now, outlining perspectives on futures. Constant increase of contingency (things could be otherwise). Uncertainty and insecurity in late modernity. Planning as a project which requires a decision (Planning- deciding about future decisions/modeling/projections/impact assessments).

2/28: University administrator Marcela Douglas and I went to take a look at the rooms where the Paparazzi Ethnography seminar is going to be held. Because of university scheduling, the three-day affair takes place in several locations.

Interesting from my perspective was that in each room one finds a little bathroom nook.

There, in the corner of each room, one finds soap, paper hand-towel dispenser, water bowl, running water (hot & cold), and a little trash bin for the used wipes.

But it was in the bath-tiled backdrop that created for me the illusion that the space was indeed a toiletry center.

Bath tiles protect the wall from splashing water and steam or perhaps even build up of residue associated with soap misting and mixing with warm water.

I suggested to Marcela that with a little investment, perhaps a curtain draping down from the ceiling along with a small shower spout connected from the sink faucet, with water pipe extending upward– the nook could be expanded to accommodate a very nearly full bathroom setting.

One curious dimension is the lack of vanity, or mirror, where it should be above the hand basin.

In the image on the right, Marcela points to the space where the missing vanity should be hanging on the bathroom tile.

In the image directly above, you can see very clearly, that a space exists specifically for the mirror, but for some reason, the vanity has not been placed there.
One can only conjecture over the missing vanity, a task we rarely carry out here on the Paparazzi Ethnographic blog. But if we were to speculate, might we suggest an efficiency of thought, a truncation of the functional (hand-, face-, teeth-washing) from the premiums of vanity sought through self-reflection. After all, the classroom, in classical literature, is not a space of demagoguery and thus, charismatic authority must be kept under check.

2/25: We have a course soon at University of Tromsø that I completely forgot to mention!

Well. It is not Really a course.

It is more like a workshop, or rather, a symposium of lectures with roundtable discussions and with So many good folks presenting. Vidar Hepsø will be flying in from NTNU (Norwegian University of Science and Technology) to give us his take on Statoil-ConocoPhillips anthropological reflections. Here at home, we have two freshly minted PhDs, Maaike Knol and Kathrine Tveiterås, from the College of Fisheries, STS specialists who will talk about their recent work on networking and net-present-value, having to do with Snøvit and Barents Sea production.

There will be expert reflection from the mouths of established senior (though not in age) U Tromsø scholars, Peter Arbo, Gunhild Hoogensen Gjørv, Sidsel Saugestad and Stuart Robinson, who will frame in different ways what the juniors (though not in experience) are presenting.

…!

It will be like the First Ever — Paparazzi Ethnographic Roundtable.

Yay!