Associate Professor, Geography and Social Anthropology, Norwegian University of Science and Technology
Biography
Arthur Mason is a political anthropologist specializing in energy security and ecological vulnerability in the global North. He is currently a Visiting Senior Fellow in the Department of Anthropology at the London School of Economics and Political Science. His books examine the relational worlds of political and industry elites and the intermediary experts through whom energy futures are imagined, staged, and governed. He is a co-editor (with Michael Watts) of the forthcoming volume The Corridor of Impact, which reconceptualizes infrastructure corridors as evolving socio-technical formations and will be presented at Energy Ethics 2026 at the University of St Andrews. His forthcoming project, Paparazzi Ethnography: An Anthropology of Surfaces and Curated Interactions, develops a methodological and theoretical intervention into the study of expertise and visibility. This work serves as a precursor to his 2024–2026 book trilogy, Inside the Energy Salon, which advances a critique of how consultant expertise shapes global governance through visual, affective, and performative authority.
Selected publications
Energy Images: Aesthetics of Resemblance and Form. London: Routledge, 2026.
Consulting Energy: From Judgment to Decision-Making. London: Routledge, 2025 (with a Foreword by Dominic Boyer).
Energy Capitol: The Waning of Regulatory Form. London: Routledge, 2024.
Arctic Abstractive Industry: Assembling the Valuable and Vulnerable North. London: Berghahn Press, 2022 (editor).
Subterranean Estates: Life Worlds of Oil and Gas. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2016 (editor with Michael Watts and Hannah Appel).
