Continuous Clarity: Strategic Knowledge without Falter

The seminar series is funded by a grant from UKRI. SOAS launched its Centre for Anthropology and Mental Health Research in Action (CAMHRA) this year, as a centre that aims to foster collaborations between anthropology and mental health research and practice.

 

Event Abstract
 

During autumn semester I teach an upper-level undergraduate course where I lecture to my students that everything is falling apart. My syllabus is chocked full of late industrial themes where monsters and ghosts haunt the capacities of positivist knowledge ensuring that any professionally published announcement containing the words “acceptable level of risk” simply means “I don’t know”.

And yet, when looking at my recently published energy trilogy loosely titled Inside the Energy Salon, it seems there are quite a few remaining statements that provide a steady stream of assurances about what really might happen tomorrow. The spokespersons for these assurances, on the lower end of status perhaps driving instructors, and on the upper end, neoliberal economists working in fairly steady markets with transparent forms of substitutability, likely wake up each day without too much bother over everything falling apart.

In this talk I will refer to this fieldsite where direct enjoyment is not yet broken as Continuous Clarity, a kind of middle range profession filled with strategic knowledge without falter. My examples will be primarily descriptive as I want to demonstrate the kinds of knowledge and visuality that enables the reduction of complexity into forms of simplicity that can serve with some fairly confident feeling as a basis of judgment about tomorrow.

Speaker

Associate Professor Arthur Mason, Norwegian University of Science and Technology.

Registration

The event is free to attend, but external/non-SOAS visitor are required to register via the link at the top of the page.