Towards critical ethnographies of resource risks: Regulatory science on shale industry risks in the global North contexts of Brussels and California

Abstract

By examining two instances of the production of scientific knowledge on the risks of shale rock exploration and extraction in the global North’s context of democratic governance and a great concern for transparency, this paper argues for a combination of ethnographic and critical geographic approaches to studying expert knowledge production on risk as different ontological realities with different political consequences. Analytically, the study distinguishes between risks related to the natural environment and human health. While the former were presented as data by the experts, the latter gained a status of local stories. Risks as data and stories co-produced different spaces of extraction risks as abstract and absolute. With this focus, I extend the call recently made in resource anthropology, i.e. by Richardson and Weszkalnys, to ethnographically study how resources become various things for various actors beyond their commodity form and address the questions about the political realities that become co-produced and the possibility to extract and govern them.