Overview

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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9780801454127

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Reviews

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. -Martha Lampland, University of California, San Diego, coeditor of Standards and Their Stories: How Quantifying, Classifying, and Formalizing Practices Shape Everyday Life The Technocratic Antarctic takes us to the icy limits, spinning an engaging tale of science and expertise in, around, and for Antarctica. Detailing the works and lives of scientists and policy folk researching and administering the continent at Earth's southern pole, Jessica O'Reilly demonstrates that 'Antarctica' is made not just in its grounded geographical location, but also in the imaginations and off-site practices of people in 'round-the-world circuits of natural science and transnational governance. Antarctica, O'Reilly's ethnography persuasively shows, has become a technocratic wilderness - a place at once measured, monitored, and modeled, but also ever unfinished. O'Reilly is an expert guide into this space both everyday and extreme. -Stefan Helmreich, Elting E. Morison Professor of Anthropology, MIT, author of Alien Ocean: Anthropological Voyages in Microbial Seas The anthropology of science, born with Bruno Latour's Laboratory Life, now enters its second phase with Jessica O'Reilly's The Technocratic Antarctic. She moves from the laboratory to the field, from networks that link scientists, instruments, objects, and texts to networks that link scientists, policymakers, and entire landscapes. She expands Latour's view of scientists as humans who observe and think by showing how they feel. Her accounts of men and women at the edge of the world on Antarctic ice lie at the center of new approaches to science. -Ben Orlove, author of Lines in the Water

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. -Martha Lampland, University of California, San Diego, coeditor of Standards and Their Stories: How Quantifying, Classifying, and Formalizing Practices Shape Everyday Life The Technocratic Antarctic takes us to the icy limits, spinning an engaging tale of science and expertise in, around, and for Antarctica. Detailing the works and lives of scientists and policy folk researching and administering the continent at Earth's southern pole, Jessica O'Reilly demonstrates that 'Antarctica' is made not just in its grounded geographical location, but also in the imaginations and off-site practices of people in 'round-the-world circuits of natural science and transnational governance. Antarctica, O'Reilly's ethnography persuasively shows, has become a technocratic wilderness - a place at once measured, monitored, and modeled, but also ever unfinished. O'Reilly is an expert guide into this space both everyday and extreme. -Stefan Helmreich, Elting E. Morison Professor of Anthropology, MIT, author of Alien Ocean: Anthropological Voyages in Microbial Seas

Author Information

Jessica O'Reilly is Assistant Professor in the Department of International Studies at Indiana University Bloomington.

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