Interview with Valerie Olson, June 2018

VO: "You still stay engaged with your topic even when there is a gap between when you first when into the field and when you come out ... research projects will change but my program is still pretty well focused on what it has been the whole time."

VO: “I think this is another benefit of including STS methods and readings and theories in one’s work, if it’s relevant to one’s topic … STS, like any other subdiscipline, hones as an anthropologist your capability to understand other practices. In order to do my work, I’ve had to do a lot of reading in and confident evaluation of a whole bunch of subdisciplines, including the life sciences, medicine, ecology, engineering, and informatics. Because of that, because I can speak those languages so to speak, I’m able to traverse these boundaries, and I have a lot of ongoing continuing relationships through grants and collaborative projects and collaborative teaching with the ecology and evolutionary biology division at UCI.”

VO: “It’s exactly the problem of boundaries and borders that fueled my interest in this [outer space] project because I was interested ... in the political, social, economic, technical dimensions of environment as a concept, and how scientific and technological practices were and have been involved in shaping what we think of as the environment or what people think of as environment as a particular kind of spatial concept. I was very interested in how astronautical and space science practices had been involved in defining the political concept of a global earthly environment but for the most part the only people that had actually paid attention to that were STS scholars when I engaged with that. Most anthropologists and environmental anthropologists were terrestrially focused in every way, and didn’t seem to be that interested in the ways in which outer space science and technology was actually contributing toward the politics of the production of environment. So people like Stefan Helmreich and Sheila Jasanoff … were trying to ask these questions, and that’s what interested me. So I was an environmental anthropologist but I was focused on the technological and scientific production of environment as a space that exceeded the Earth: when did that start, what kinds of colonial and political, military and elite, conceptual, philosophical, and technical practices are bound up in that, and medical practices as well … There is now a beginning of an anthropology of outer space kind of sub-interest, but at the time I did it was considered completely weird, and it was assumed that I was an STS person, because space science and astronautics would have fallen in the STS category. I still am interested when people identify me and identify my project as an STS project when I see it as very squarely anthropological … we’re sort of crossing boundaries between anthropology and STS, and trying to bring the two together in interesting ways.”

Olson was studying at Rice when the Columbia space shuttle exploded over Texas. Inspired to understand NASA from an anthropologist’s point of view, Olson “traded [her] skills in [her] former career, [her] practical skills as a research manager, for entrance into NASA, and it was very successful.”

Olson, Valerie. Interview by author. Personal interview. Irvine, CA, June 12, 2018.

VO: “I think that there’s going to be a flourishing of publicly-facing and publicly-engaged STS-informed social science. I would extend that beyond anthropology. Because if you look at some of the forward-thinking and groundbreaking anthropologist and STS folks who’ve gotten into the corporate world or into institutions or into places where decisions about future kinds of scientific and technical processes are being produced, it’s really remarkable to think about the possibilities - and I think Kim [Fortun] is the best articulator of this - the possibilities that exist in thinking about the relationship between social justice, research justice, and how anthropologists and people who are informed by STS can enter places of practice and influence and perhaps change the course of some of the emerging forms of science and technology in the world; and that’s what Emily Brooks and I are trying to do in our watershed ethnography is that we are inviting engineers to turn their typical attitudes toward social groups and societies on their heads. Instead of prescribing for communities and social groups what they need (because they’re used to doing so as technocrats and experts) we are using an ethnographically-informed process to go out into communities to collect local water knowledge. We will use these data to provide people in positions of leadership in the water engineering and water provision community with information about what communities think and know about water in their own communities. We are developing a working concept of community water expertise. We are reversing the flow of water information from, moving it from communities into technical centers rather than vice versa. What Bruno Latour would call the citadels, or the centers of calculation from which knowledge flows well, we’re reversing the flow of information by giving those centers new forms of water system knowledge existing within communities. We’re bringing community expertise about water and about community strengths and needs into those technocratic centers. That’s when I’m feeling optimistic, because of what I feel an STS-informed social science practice can try to do.”