The great economization of the Ocean: Following cod and doing empirical economy

About the seminar:
In this talk Kristin Asdal and Tone Huse will discuss how the ocean, in the years proceeding WWII, has been harnessed to become a space of ever-intensifying capital investment and innovation. They trace this transformation by looking at how nature, the Atlantic cod in particular, is wrested into the economy, but also show how nature, in turn, resists, adapts to, and even changes the economy. These “co-modifications”, they argue, are best studied by the approach they coin “empirical economy” – an approach for the study of economy that insists that we can best understand how economizations value and order nature by staying close to the empirics of how they are done. Through what practices, by use of what tools, apparatuses, agencies, and so forth do economizations in fact unfold?

Rather than presume that there is a capitalism, some inner logic to or great force driving economization, Asdal and Huse attend to the nitty-gritty work of turning the ocean into a space of vested economic interests and the cod into an animal fit for industrial purposes. In this talk they discuss the ocean’s economization by looking more closely at the ideas of biocapital and biocapitalization. They explore these through a series of scientific experiments aimed at training and domesticating the Atlantic cod, equipping it, the idea was, with accumulative properties.

Tamara Fernando will act as respondent and pick up some of the broad themes and ideas around oceans and the anthropocene for audience discussion.

This seminar is part of the Anthropocene Histories seminar series and will take place online.