Department of Anthropology and Sociology
& School of Anthropology, Media and Gender
Arthur Mason
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Key information
Key information
- Roles
- Department of Anthropology and Sociology School of Anthropology, Media and Gender Research Associate
- Department
- Department of Anthropology and Sociology & School of Anthropology, Media and Gender
- Email address
- am2@soas.ac.uk
Biography
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).
