Search for: All records

Abstract Since 2001, beetles have killed two‐thirds of the pine trees in British Columbia, Canada, decimating the predominant commercial tree species in one of the world's largest timber economies. Attempts to construct and circulate computer models of the infestation and its aftermaths, however, have obscured destabilizing changes across state institutions for environmental research. Juxtaposing literary conceptualizations of distributed authorship with ethnographic critiques of technoscientific bureaucracy, this article examines how the proliferation of computer models in contemporary resource planning institutions has altered the ways experts participate in and sanction interpretive communities. The dynamic conceptualizations of authorship produced through these exchanges challenge existing portraits of anticipatory governance, an emergent mode of administration that often relies on models for procedural implementation and narrative framing even as it circumscribes modellers’ voices to specific moments of interpretation and critique. While modellers make claims on distant futures to provoke discussion among diverse actors, later interpreters may highlight a model's apparent precision or its radical uncertainties to defer criticisms of problematic interventions and government restructuring. Such modes of attribution have deepened many scientists’ sense of estrangement from the interpretive communities their models help to engender. 

Abstract Government-run geological surveys have increasingly facilitated exploration for potential mines by inviting novice prospectors to sift through old datasets prior to visiting physical sites, a process known colloquially as desktop prospecting. In northern British Columbia, Canada, some novices have developed sophisticated techniques for analyzing promising signs in these data and narrativizing their own desktop prospecting labor within broader environmental and economic shifts playing out across rural Canada. This article examines how efforts to vernacularize simulation-based geological expertise into new forms of work-from-home labor is transforming the ways settler entrepreneurs articulate attachments to rural areas. This growing interdependence of entrepreneurial web-based prospecting and extractivism writ large underscores a fundamental transition in how government ministries and developers relate the development of mines to the making of homes. Computer modeling tools have transformed prospectors’ relations with people and places by altering where and how they conduct day-to-day work. The valorization of model-work as an accessible, democratizing practice has also shaped how prospectors discern what kinds of homes bear the risks of mineral exploration labor. With free maps and simple analytical software in hand, BC-based geotechnical institutions insist, individual prospectors might yet play critical roles in luring mineral exploration companies back to the region after a decades-long decline in mining activity. As climate change renders regional timber extraction uncertain and mining industry restructuring continues apace, settler prospectors’ homemaking aspirations are turning inward toward domestic spaces of labor—some of the few spaces where precariously employed resource workers can still maintain illusions of control. 

In the early 2010s, a spectacular fall in prices for a class of mineral commodities called the rare earth elements (REEs) and the collapse of hundreds of new exploration companies made clear the fragility of the high-risk markets around these companies and the strategies of legitimation that supported them. New regulatory processes built around technical disclosures generated vast stores of geotechnical data. Rather than generating trust among market actors, however, these processes dramatically altered the temporalities of global extraction and energized unruly narrative spaces. In their efforts to keep mineral claims active and companies afloat, REE-focused exploration experts have struggled to navigate different arenas of discussion while holding their respective logics in tension. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with exploration geologists and promoters, this article examines how experts federate flows of ‘serious’ and ‘speculative’ information in both carefully regulated reports and rumor-filled online forums. Such spaces are organized by aesthetic conventions and social criteria for establishing persuasiveness—forms that STS scholars have long analyzed as literary technologies. Rather than helping to secure experts’ authority, however, I argue that the diverse literary technologies that now dominate exploration promotion and finance work have radically redistributed interpretive roles. In their struggles to mediate senses of ‘crisis’ endemic within venture markets, exploration experts must enact the ideals undergirding new regulatory requirements even as they learn to defer to the speculative musings of others.