BSAS - Penny Harvey: Thinking "in time" about the deep future - nuclear waste and the possibilities of ethnography

Abstract

In a conversation about planetary futures, Bruno Latour and Isabelle Stengers (Latour et. al. 2018) discuss the value of thinking 'in time' as opposed to assuming the temporality of 'catastrophe'. To be 'in time' is to be in a position of possibility for thought in the face of an urgent challenge. To be 'in time' is also to be somewhere in particular, with the possibilities that pertain to that time and space. In this regard, Stengers forcefully argues that it is of central importance to attend to how people notice things. Scientific and other modes of expert knowledge-making are specific ways of noticing, but not the only ways. Ethnographic ways of noticing involve an analytical attention to the conceptual repertoires of others, through a focus on relational dynamics, habitual modes of connection and disconnection, and the preconditions and disruptive consequences of specific events. In this paper I present some of the key intellectual challenges posed by the urgent need to dispose of nuclear waste in ways that will protect both current and future human and other-than-human lives. Amongst these challenges is the difficulty of thinking 'in time' about processes that exceed the human scale.

Bionote

Penny Harvey is Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Manchester, Fellow of the British Academy, of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters, and the Academia Europaea. Her research has focused on infrastructures of social change, the material and social relations of modern statecraft, knowledge practices and the politics of value. She has conducted long-term ethnographic research in Peru looking originally at language and power, and then on civic infrastructure projects including road construction, sanitation, and waste management systems. She co-founded the Beam network for social research on nuclear within the Dalton Nuclear Institute and is currently engaged in the ethnographic study of nuclear decommissioning infrastructures in the UK. She is Deputy Chair of the UK Government Committee on Radioactive Waste Management.

The department seminar, known as Bergen Social Anthropology Seminars (BSAS), is the main forum for dialogue and debate about anthropological research and theoretical development at the Department in Bergen. All is welcome!