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This research ethnographically explores how the North Sea oil and gas industry in the UK and Norway instigates a ‘post-oil’ future through the socio-material and epistemological processes of decommissioning. Catalyzed by and performed through operators’ legal liability for the end-of-life processing of sites, this research explores how extractivism’s consequences are constructed and distributed across temporal scales. A socio-political construction of liability offers a critical lens to analyze the limits of how the industry scales risk, generates knowledge of future harm, and makes claims to the future through decommissioning.

Ava Rawson is an anthropology DPhil in the Institute for Science, Innovation, and Society at the University of Oxford and a Fellow with the Society for the Anthropology of Europe and Council of European Studies.

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