The Technocratic Antarctic is an ethnographic account of the scientists and policymakers who work on Antarctica. In a place with no indigenous people, Antarctic scientists and policymakers use expertise as their primary model of governance. Scientific research and policymaking are practices that inform each other, and the Antarctic environment—with its striking beauty, dramatic human and animal lives, and specter of global climate change—not only informs science and policy but also lends Antarctic environmentalism a particularly technocratic patina.
Jessica O’Reilly conducted most of her research for this book in New Zealand, home of the "Antarctic Gateway" city of Christchurch, and on an expedition to Windless Bight, Antarctica, with the New Zealand Antarctic Program. O’Reilly also follows the journeys Antarctic scientists and policymakers take to temporarily "Antarctic" places such as science conferences, policy workshops, and the international Antarctic Treaty meetings in Scotland, Australia, and India. Competing claims of nationalism, scientific disciplines, field experiences, and personal relationships among Antarctic environmental managers disrupt the idea of a utopian epistemic community. O’Reilly focuses on what emerges in Antarctica among the complicated and hybrid forms of science, sociality, politics, and national membership found there. The Technocratic Antarctic unfolds the historical, political, and moral contexts that shape experiences of and decisions about the Antarctic environment.
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The Technocratic Antarctic is an ethnographic account of the scientists and policymakers who work on Antarctica. Jessica O'Reilly conducted most of her research for this book in New Zealand, home of the "Antarctic Gateway" city of Christchurch, and on an expedition to Windless Bight, Antarctica, with the New Zealand Antarctic Program.
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Introduction1. The Imagined Antarctic2. The Environmental History of the Antarctic3. Sensing the Ice 4. Samples and Specimens at Antarctic Biosecurity Borders5. Managing Antarctic Science in an Epistemic Technocracy6. Tectonic Time and Sacred Geographies in the Larsemann Hills7. Charismatic Data and Climate ChangeConclusion: The Technocratic Governance of Nature
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This book offers a focused 'ethnographic account' of those who provide scientific expertise and environmental governance on all matters pertaining to Antarctica. In O'Reilly's work, the scientific and policy practices described emerge from 'historical, moral, and political contexts' that help determine the scope and nature of managing Antarctica.... This book serves as a fine resource for those seeking more information about Antarctica and aspects of its environmental policy. Summing Up: Recommended. Graduate students, faculty, and professionals.
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The Technocratic Antarctic tackles important questions about how nature is discovered and policy crafted, intimately intertwined practices binding multiple communities of scientists and policymakers. Jessica O'Reilly has chosen a fascinating field site: the continent of Antarctica and its various outposts—scientific labs, environmental management agencies, Greenpeace mobilizations, the airport in New Zealand, and international meeting rooms scattered across the globe. O'Reilly chronicles five engrossing case studies that illustrate the ways in which science and policy are necessarily imbricated in the most mundane activities and the most monumental.
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A series edited by Dominic Boyer
Expertise isdedicated to publishing innovative scholarship situated at the vibrant juncture of the anthropology of knowledge, science and technology studies, and new media studies. The proliferation of new technologies across the world today is generating new forms of knowledge and techniques of knowing that are in turn transforming existing practices and institutions. Understanding these emerging cultures of expertise ranks among the most challenging and rewarding horizons of the human sciences. Expertise seeks to extend this horizon and to create new opportunities for conversation and collaboration. We seek theoretically sophisticated, historically attuned works of ethnography from anthropologists and other scholars.
The following is an illustrative but not exhaustive list of areas of research and scholarship that interest us:
•Professions, professionalism, and cultures of expertise
•Technocracy, bureaucratic practices, and institutions
•Expertise and authority in scientific, technical, and medical communities
•The diversification of digital media and information technologies and their cultural and political effects
•New media and information practices in contemporary political and social movements
•The intersection of religious and spiritual knowledge with scientific and secular knowledge
•Late liberal and neosocialist forms of political expertise, administration, and management
•Contemporary efforts to commodify knowledge and capitalist knowledge industries and economies
•Globalization, transnational ecologies of expertise, and circulating forms of knowledge and information
The series editor for Expertise is Dominic Boyer, Department of Anthropology Rice University (dcb2@rice.edu).
Praise for Expertise: Cultures and Technologies of Knowledge
"In Dominic Boyer's series, the long deferred and exotic anthropology of elites finally becomes, most productively, the ethnography of experts, on which so many lively topical openings in contemporary anthropological research depend. Experts are subjects, partners, sponsors, and audiences—all of which shape the spaces and questions that anthropologists distinctively create in their research. It is so important to have a series defined in this way, and it is exciting to watch as each new volume appears."
—George E. Marcus, University of California, Irvine
"Dominic Boyer's aptly named Expertise series tackles issues that are of pressing interest globally and that will likewise define anthropology’s future: the effects of new media and technology, the contemporary threat of disease, the spread of capitalist management techniques, and more. Boyer has assembled exceptional scholars who adroitly analyze these emerging conditions and the knowledge practices they call into being. The Expertise series is an important venue for exciting, innovative, and urgent work."
—Caitlin Zaloom, New York University
“Imaginative, sophisticated, and, yes, displaying extraordinary expertise, this series brings together remarkable studies of the social life of contemporary knowledges—and of the actors and institutions central to their transformation. Individually fascinating and grounded in the textures of emergent practice, these volumes together constitute a rich and generative conversation of real consequence.”
—Donald L. Brenneis, University of California, Santa Cruz
“For the last decade or so interest in the nature of expertise and the operation of cultures of expertise has moved from the margins to the center of anthropological research. The Expertise series published by Cornell University Press not only fully anticipated this trend but also has been in the forefront of defining its intellectual interests and its ethnographic ambitions. The series demonstrates how a bold new synthesis of disciplinary (and interdisciplinary) agendas is gaining articulation, a synthesis that demands serious attention to how theory and data themselves operate within cultures of expertise. Encompassing many of the most important and challenging areas of global knowledge production--media, religion, politics, medicine, science, and technology--the books in the series reveal the creative role of expertise in defining the institutional imperatives and the managerial practices of our time.”
—Douglas Holmes, Binghamton University
“In a more or less tacit sense, anthropology has always involved the study of expert knowledge and expert practice. But this indispensable new series from Cornell University Press invites us to confront the problem of expertise as a conceptual object in itself, one that is at once grounded in particular institutional settings and constantly in a state of translation across domains of media, science, politics, and entrepreneurship.”
—William Mazzarella, University of Chicago
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Produktdetaljer
ISBN
9780801456923
Publisert
2017
Utgiver
Vendor
Cornell University Press
Vekt
454 gr
Høyde
229 mm
Bredde
152 mm
Dybde
16 mm
Aldersnivå
01, U, P, 05, 06
Språk
Product language
Engelsk
Format
Product format
Heftet
Forfatter
Biographical note
Jessica O’Reilly is Assistant Professor in the Department of International Studies at Indiana University Bloomington.