Oil Collaborations: reflections on the disassembly/reassembly of the UK hydrocarbon complex

This is a HYBRID event, taking place in person and online. Pre-booking is essential.

What does it mean to collaborate in the context of a highly charged research object? Why does this lead us to query the premises and possibilities of collaborative academic research? This talk draws on our experience of researching, for the past three years, the UK’s oil and gas sector whose complexity, distributed nature, and intense pace of change appear to call for a collaborative approach. Rather than generating a unified picture, our research emphasises fragmentation. It also foregrounds the ethics and practice of research as a set of relations in formation. We explore how collaboration involves navigating a series of differences (epistemological, institutional, structural, political), suggesting a type of ‘anti-collaboration’ which problematises conventional notions of collaboration as an aspirational goal.

Gavin Bridge (Durham University)

Alexander Dodge (NTNU)

Nana de Graaff (VU-Amsterdam)

James Marriott (Platform-London)

William Otchere-Darko (Newcastle University)

Tiago Teixeira (Northumbria University)

Gisa Weszkalnys (LSE)

This UCL Anthropocene event is held in collaboration with the Institute of Advanced Studies