Cite as:
Badami, Nandita, and Maggie Woodruff. 2018. “Valerie Olson.” In UCI Anthro Faculty, edited by James Adams and Maggie Woodruff. In UCI Anthro STS, edited by James Adams and Maggie Woodruff. In STS Across Borders Digital Exhibit, edited by Aalok Khandekar and Kim Fortun. Society for Social Studies of Science. August. http://stsinfrastructures.org/content/valerie-olson/essay.
This PECE essay helps to answer the STS Across Borders analytic question: “What people, projects, and products exemplify how this STS formation has developed over time?”
This essay is part of a broader exhibit on UCI Anthro STS.
STS Across Borders is a special exhibit organized by the Society for Social Studies of Science (4S) to showcase how the field of Science and Technology Studies (STS) has developed in different times, places...Read more
Olson is an environmental anthropologist who researches sociocultural dimensions of large-scale ecosystem science and governance in North America. Her projects focus on how remote and largely unpopulated environments, like outer space and ocean subsurfaces, become important sites in the production of new ecological knowledge, technologies, and politics. She is currently investigating the social organization, economics, and transboundary politics of marine ecosystem restoration in the Gulf of Mexico after the 2012 BP oil disaster.
(From UCI Sustainability Profile, http://sustainability.uci.edu/portfolio-items/valerie-olson/)
Read a short interview with Valerie at:
http://culturesofenergy.com/a-cup-of-coffee-in-outer-space-a-brief-inter...
Asked what STS books blew her mind, Valerie Olson had this to say:
Annemarie Mol, The Body Multiple - “a genius work”
Hannah Landecker, Culturing Life - “one of the most beautiful books I’ve ever read”
Stefan Helmreich, Alien Ocean - “
What if outer space is not outside the human environment but, rather, defines it? This is the unusual starting point of Valerie Olson’s Into the Extreme, revealing how outer space contributes to making what counts as the scope and scale of today’s natural and social environments. With unprecedented access to spaceflight worksites ranging from astronaut training programs to life science labs and architecture studios, Olson examines how U.S. experts work within the solar system as the container of life and as a vast site for new forms of technical and political environmental control.
Source: Publisher's website
Abstract: As “the Anthropocene” emerges as a geological term and environmental analytic, this paper examines its emerging rhetorical topology. We show that Anthropocene narratives evince a macroscale division between an “inner” and “outer” environment. This division situates an Anthropocenic environment that matters in the surface zone between Earth's subsurface and the extraterrestrial “outer spaces” that we address here. We review literature in the sciences and social sciences to show how contemporary environmental thinking has been informed by understandings of Earth's broader planet-scaled environmental relations. Yet, today's Anthropocene conversation draws analytic attention inward and downward. Bringing in literature from scholars who examine the role of the extraterrestrial and outer environmental perspectives in terrestrial worlds, we suggest that Anthropocenic theorizations can productively incorporate inclusive ways of thinking about environments that matter. We argue for keeping “Anthropocene” connected to its spatial absences and physical others, including those that are non-anthropos in the extreme.
Abstract: Using data from an ethnographic study of American astronautics, I argue that, in an inversion of the usual clinical model, astronaut medical subjecthood is fundamentally environmental rather than biological. In extreme environments like outer space, the concept of environment cannot be bracketed out from life processes; as a result, investments of power and knowledge shift from life itself to the sites of interface among living things, technologies, and environments. To illustrate what this means on the ground, I describe space biomedicine as a form of environmental medicine that seeks to optimize and manage technically enabled human ecologies where life and environment are dually problematized. I provide two examples of what I term its ecobiopolitical strategies: creating a new “space normal” physiological category and situating humans as at-risk elements within integrated biological/technological/environmental systems.
Valerie Olson's CV is available on her faculty website. Read more