SMI Seminar Series

Event Details

Date:

Thursday, 06 August 2015

Time:

10:00 am - 11:00 am

Room:

Level 7 Visualisation Lab

UQ Location:

Sir James Foots Building (St Lucia)

Event category(s):

Full Description:: Deep seabed mining, the extraction of mineral resources from at least 4000 meters below sea level is hotly contested by politicians, activists, and scientists. Little is understood about the science and ecology of benthic environments, and fluctuating commodity markets make seabed mining a high risk, high reward venture. Corporate field scientists conducting prospective research in the Pacific Ocean negotiate these and other risks that endanger the project on a daily basis. Due to the high frequency of risk and uncertainty during this phase of mining, such projects are at their most vulnerable to not only economic, mechanical, and environmental hazards, but also public scrutiny and stakeholder confidence. As such, boutique seabed mining companies fastidiously control the creation and disclosure of knowledge within the company and third party access to information. In this presentation, I overview some of the access and knowledge claim issues both “outside” researchers and “inside” corporate scientists face when making truth claims about the environment.

Lindsey is in the MA/PhD Cultural Anthropology Program at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. She received her BA in Linguistic Anthropology at Lake Forest College, in Lake Forest Illinois. Her work focuses on natural resource management in the Pacific, especially mineral extraction and mining exploration.