Counting and Counter-mapping: Contests over the Making of a Mining District in Bristol Bay, Alaska

Hébert, Karen; Brock, Samara

doi:10.1080/09505431.2016.1223112

Cited by 20 publications

(8 citation statements)

References 37 publications

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“…For Cambridge Energy experts and their clients, however, the arrangement of these quantifiable elements served to propel their expertise and its material effects into the future. This is because, as Karen Hébert and Samara Brock () have pointed out, quantification enlivens registers of knowledge and experience. By accumulating individual numbers and interchangeable units, experts can build powerful stories of uniqueness.…”

Section: Of Quantities and Qualitiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Consulting virtue: from judgement to decision‐making in the natural gas industry

Mason

2019

Royal Anthropological Inst

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Shifts in the terrain of energy politics have given rise to consultant experts who produce and distribute knowledge of energy futures. Drawing on fieldwork at executive roundtables in global cities across North America, this essay examines the consolidation of this form of expertise and the opulent settings in which it is distributed. By exploring the role of aesthetic judgement in market‐orientated decision‐making, it contributes to anthropological work on elites, expertise, and energy ethics by highlighting the relationship between credibility and luxury. The essay also considers the enrolment of the expert in a kind of virtue ethics, whereby adherence to neoclassical economic principles is taken to be a character trait worthy of emulation. While clients may not look to consultants for advice coded in terms of ethics, I argue that they regard the person‐based qualities of consultants as proxies for their ability to recommend a judicious course of action. By adopting this analytic, the essay sheds new light on the confidence that clients place in consultants by drawing out the relationship between depersonalized, quantitative approaches to energy markets and the virtue of the persons who propose them.

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Section: Of Quantities and Qualitiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Consulting virtue: from judgement to decision‐making in the natural gas industry

Mason

2019

Royal Anthropological Inst

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“…The Katz (2001) notion of topographies and countertopographies is firmly situated in a tradition of feminist and critical geography (Hébert and Brock, 2017; Kwan, 2002; Maharawal and McElroy, 2018; Peluso, 1995). Drawing on early feminist critiques of science (Haraway, 1988; Harding, 1992), this body of research emphasises the importance of situating knowledge and acknowledging the partiality of all perspectives, with a strong normative commitment to reducing inequalities and contributing to progressive social change.…”

Section: (Counter)topographies and Situated Knowledgesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Carbon-binding biomass or a diversity of useful trees? (Counter)topographies of carbon forestry in Uganda

Fischer

Giertta

Hajdú

2019

Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space

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Tree plantations in low-income countries are emerging as central tools for global climate change mitigation. However, there is growing evidence that focusing on the carbon-binding aspect of trees in such forests often oversimplifies political ecologies and constrains local livelihoods. One reason is a strong reliance on land use maps, leading to monodimensional and disconnected views of landscapes. This study examines one such climate forest, Kachung plantation in Uganda, run by the company Green Resources on land leased from the Ugandan state through its National Forest Authority. The carbon emission reductions are purchased by the Swedish Energy Agency. Drawing on the Katz conceptualisation of countertopographies, we present a ‘situated topography’ of Kachung based on the experiences of local women. In contrast to the ‘distant topography’ produced by the actors investing in the project, it reveals a dynamic landscape where women know and use a diversity of local trees and have well-established strategies for regeneration. However, their access to useful trees and farmland is constrained by the plantation, resulting in increased livelihood struggles. In line with Katz, we suggest that producing similar situated topographies for other climate forests can help create strong countertopographies, displaying more diverse, connected and dynamic uses of landscapes than seen from a distance.

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“…Hébert and Brock (2017) take special care to document the construction of alternative visions of the land promoted by anti-Pebble activists in Bristol Bay, particularly the mapping projects undertaken by Bristol Bay communities as acts of redefining and ‘assembling new publics in opposition to resource-extractive designs’. Holley and Mitcham’s (2016) work and Hébert’s (2016) analysis of ‘overflows’ show, too, how participants in Pebble’s early dialogue processes effectively contested official interpretations of scientific data and appropriated Pebble’s data for their own ends.…”

Section: Constructions Of Land and Resourcesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Land as material, knowledge and relationships: Resource extraction and subsistence imaginaries in Bristol Bay, Alaska

Panikkar

Tollefson

2018

Soc Stud Sci

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This article examines the social, historical and political constitution of land and resource imaginaries in Bristol Bay, Alaska. We compare the dynamics of these different imaginaries in the region within the early permitting debates concerning the proposed Pebble Mine to understand the contemporary politics of defining and constructing ideologies of extractive resource use. We show that the civic epistemologies and ontologies embedded in different social, scientific and political practices help explain environmental actions and outcomes. We demonstrate that the contested fields of social imagination allow for resource exploitation – commodification, extraction and profit – that endangers nature, but also allow for building alternative imaginaries and constructions of land and value as key components of environmental justice and land sovereignty initiatives. Contestations can also highlight problematic and unjust resource practices that disenfranchise and destabilize subordinate industries, poor communities, indigenous lands and subsistence or renewable resource use. These divergent discourses, and the deliberative valuations of alternative futures that they contribute to, are not effectively considered in Alaska’s large mine permitting process.

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Counting and Counter-mapping: Contests over the Making of a Mining District in Bristol Bay, Alaska

Cited by 20 publications

References 37 publications

Consulting virtue: from judgement to decision‐making in the natural gas industry

Consulting virtue: from judgement to decision‐making in the natural gas industry

Carbon-binding biomass or a diversity of useful trees? (Counter)topographies of carbon forestry in Uganda

Land as material, knowledge and relationships: Resource extraction and subsistence imaginaries in Bristol Bay, Alaska

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