- Which research project are you currently working on the most?
I have three current research projects but the one I most excited about is my new work on ’Unruly Energy Frontiers’. This project looks at the politics of sociomaterial entanglements which shape how efforts to govern uncertainty unfold.
- What do you want to find out?
In the Unruliess work, I am interested in how societies attempt to govern uncertainty. Currently research and planning resources are mainly invested in predicting the future so as to mitigate uncertainties. But my work is interested in the relations that cannot be predicted. The complexities of geopolitics, energy infrastructures, struggles over authority to govern change, and conflicting visions of how the future ought to be mean that trajectories of change do not fit neatly into risk assessments which assume a certain amount of predictability to uncertainty. My concern is what unpredictability means for governing and how to create more dynamic governance systems capable of facing dynamic uncertainties.
- Why is this important?
There is a lot of attention right now to sustainable energy transitions, usually assumed to encompass green infrastrucures, green energy and equitable distribution of energy resources. These efforts, however, often miss the ways that energy transitions themselves become bound up in struggles for authority to govern change, conflicting visions of a ’good life’ and social justice questions related to access to and control over energy resources—not to mention how these dynamics are embedded within material and ecosystem processes. My work takes those struggles and uncertainties as the starting point and asks how conflict is a potentially constructive force within rapid rate socioenvironmental change.
- Who do you collaborate with?
I collaborate with people from all over the world in my projects. Hemant R. Ojha, University of Canberra, Noemi Gonda, SLU Sweden, Dil Khatri, SIAS Nepal and SLU Sweden, Siri Eriksen, NMBU and Ben Muok, JOOST University, Kenya, Selmira Flores from Nicaragua, and I have worked together for over 10 years. The Unruliness work is bringing in new collaborators incluing Giulia Di Nunno from mathematics at UiO, several colleagues from the Cornell University Bioacoustics Lab, Michelle Bastian from Edinburgh University, and Mabel Gergan from Vanderbuilt University. My thinking is deeply influenced by conversations with Linus Rosén from SLU, Helene Alhborg from Chalmers University, Sweden, Katie Epstein from Cornell University, Tim Forsyth from LSE, René Rodriguez-Fabilena from Antwerp University, and Muriel Cote from Lund University.
- What do you look for when choosing partners?
It is crucial for me to collaborate with people from different career stages and who have an interest in interdisciplinary problems. I have described my work as ’chimeric scholarship’ which means that I work in parallel with different ontological and epistemological entry points into my overall research topic. I therefore value working with people who can similarly hold in view more than one set of results or solutions to research problems. I find the frictions across different disciplinary commitments to open up new questions. I need people around me who can help me work through those frictions and point out my blindspots.
- What other research projects are you involved in?
I am finalising work on a project funded by the Swedish Reseach Council (VR) Governing Climate Resilient Futures: gender, justice and conflict resolution in resource management that has tracked the politics of climate change interventions in Nepal, Nicaragua and Kenya. My third project is a new interdisciplinary collaboration on climate change and migration. This is an exciting team led by the University of Gothenburg that includes climate modellers and social scientists. All three projects overlap in important ways but the Unruliness work is the most ambitious.
- What do you think is the most interesting thing about being a researcher?
I feel privledged to be able to take on questions that have real meaning for society and to work with such exciting colleagues from all over the world. Being a researcher means I can take on super abstract, philosophical questions which can appear far from ’policy relevant research’. However for me, these need to be grounded in dynamics I find playing out on the ground. I firmly believe researchers need to be given the freedom to ask those big questions and take risks in research to find new ways of coping with the deep uncertainty and change this century has thrown up.