Arthur Mason (BA, Columbia University; MA, University of Alaska Fairbanks; PhD, University of California, Berkeley) is Associate Professor of Social Anthropology at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) and a Research Affiliate at the University of St Andrews, with visiting appointments at the London School of Economics.
His research examines energy and environmental transitions, Arctic extractive industries, expertise, and the cultural politics of governance, with particular attention to how data, imagery, and abstraction shape policy, investment, and public futures. He is the author and editor of multiple books on energy, infrastructure, and Arctic modernity and has led major international research collaborations across Europe and North America. At SOAS, he is developing The Future of the Promenade: A Climate-Changed Form, which explores how climate change is reshaping leisure geographies and urban planning through the northward migration of the beach promenade.
His recently completed Routledge trilogy, Inside the Energy Salon, theorizes expert performance as a central mechanism of late-liberal governance, analyzing how energy futures are made legible, investable, and morally persuasive within policy and financial networks. He is co-editing The Corridor of Impact (with Michael Watts), to be presented at Energy Ethics 2026, which reconceptualizes infrastructure corridors as socio-technical formations shaped by governance, expertise, and contestation.
Arthur has held funded visiting appointments at Rice University, the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Calgary. His research has been supported by the U.S. National Science Foundation, Fulbright awards (US–Norway, US–Russia, US–Canada), the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the S.V. Ciriacy-Wantrup Fellowship, and a European Research Council Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellowship.
Key publications
Energy Images: Aesthetics of Resemblance and Form. Routledge, 2026; Consulting Energy: From Judgment to Decision-Making. Routledge, 2025 (with a Foreword by Dominic Boyer); Energy Capitol: The Waning of Regulatory Form. Routledge, 2024; Arctic Abstractive Industry: Assembling the Valuable and Vulnerable North. Berghahn Press, 2022; Subterranean Estates: Life Worlds of Oil and Gas. Cornell University Press, 2016 (with Michael Watts and Hannah Appel).
Review of: Synnøve K. N. Bendixsen and Edvard Hviding: Anthropology in Norway: Directions, Locations, RelationsSynnøve K. N. Bendixsen and Edvard Hviding Anthropology in Norway: Directions, Locations, RelationsCanon Pyon, UK: Sean Kingston Publishing 2021, ISBN: 978-1-912385-30-0
Mason, Arthur, 2023, Norsk antropologisk tidsskrift (33), 3/4, pp 332-335
Naming an Endless Process of Indigenization: Returns - Becoming Indigenous in the Twenty-First Century. By James Clifford. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2013
Mason, Arthur, 2015, Current Anthropology (56), 6, pp 925-926
Deluxe energy: Newly commodified regimes of luxurious energy
Mason, Arthur (2023). In: Nadesan, Majia, (eds.), Pasqualetti, Martin J., (eds.) and Keahey, Jennifer, (eds.), Energy democracies for sustainable futures. London: Elsevier, pp 287-291
Mason, Arthur (2023). In: Fuccaro, Nelida, (eds.) and Limbert, Mandana, (eds.), Life worlds of Middle Eastern oil: histories and ethnographies of black gold. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, pp 139-161
Preface. From Northern Lights to Fluorescent Lights
Mason, Arthur (2022). In: Mason, Arthur, (ed.), Arctic abstractive industry : assembling the valuable and vulnerable North. New York: Berghahn, pp viii-xiii
Representation without Resemblance: Graphical Expression in Hydrocarbon Industry
Mason, Arthur (2022). In: Mason, Arthur, (ed.), Arctic abstractive industry : assembling the valuable and vulnerable North. New York: Berghahn, pp 166-186
Appel, Hannah, Mason, Arthur and Watts, Michael (2018). In: Appel, Hannah, (eds.), Mason, Arthur, (eds.) and Watts, Michael, (eds.), Subterranean estates : life worlds of oil and gas. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, pp 1-26
Consulting Arctic energy: From political hearings to roundtable events
Mason, Arthur (2018). In: Nuttall, Mark, (eds.), Christensen, Torben R, (eds.) and Siegert, Martin, (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of the Polar Regions. London: Routledge
Growth Imperative: Intermediaries, Discourse Frameworks, and the Arctic
Mason, Arthur (2015). In: Pincus, Rebecca, (eds.) and Ali, Saleem H., (eds.), Diplomacy on Ice: Energy and the Environment in the Arctic and Antarctic. New Haven: Yale University Press, pp 141-150
Whither the Historicities of Alutiiq Heritage Work are Drifting
Mason, Arthur (2010). In: Forte, Maximilian C., (ed.), Indigenous cosmopolitans : transnational and transcultural Indigeneity in the twenty-first century. New York: Peter Lang
