Duplicate of CET Lunch: Conducting ethnographic fieldwork on a LNG shuttle tanker

Our speaker will present in person at the CET offices. Participants can sign up and tune in via stream, or turn up at CET where lunch will be served on a first-come, first-served basis.

Conducting ethnographic fieldwork on an LNG shuttle tanker: methodological and analytical reflections. 

Long term ethnographic fieldwork on board commercial ships is rare among social scientists: in the world, only a bunch of scholars have had access to this privileged field of observation. The unusuality of it combined with the already mystic nature of shipping creates challenges which can greatly impact upon the uncertain unfolding of fieldwork. The uncertainties are not only methodological but also analytical. Nevertheless, this context forces to reconsider certain black boxes and impasses in ethnography, opening to exciting new opportunities to gather and analyze data.

About the speaker:

Marianna Betti has completed her PhD in social anthropology from the University of Bergen in 2020. She holds a MPhil in the anthropology of development (2010) from the same institution and a Master (2005) from the Cotsen Institute of Archaeology at UCLA. Marianna Betti has conducted anthropological fieldwork in Eastern Africa and Europe and her research interests lay in political ecology, the anthropology of oil and energy, development and phenomenology. In her phd research she has explored the recent discovery of hydrocarbons in the region of Turkana in Kenya and how the oil operations had affected social relations at different scales and how disparate groups have respondended to the fast changes brought by the discovery of the oil. Betti's most recent interests are on what forms and social manifestations of energy transition do to social practices, the vast array of conflict arising from, for instance, energy vulnerability and the unequal redistribution of energy resource, and on the life and agency of "hyperobjects" embedded in the "automation turn".