AN ABSTRACT OF THE THESIS OF Samantha Newton for the degree of Master of Arts in Environmental Arts and Humanities presented on December 11, 2018. Title: The Space Between: How We Understood, Valued, and Governed the Ocean Through the Process of Marine Science and Emerging Technologies Abstract approved: ______________________________________________________ Jacob Darwin Hamblin Ian Angell, in the New Barbarian Manifesto, wrote “A ‘brave new world’ is being forced upon unsuspecting societies by advances in information technology.” It would seem then, that technological advances happen automatically and have a life of their own. There is a logic to technological advancements that is outside human control, so people tend to react to and accommodate technological change, rather than try to reverse or redirect it. Angell’s idea draws a line between two academic theories—either technology shapes people (technological determinism) or people shape technology (social constructionism). Although other scholars, like Tommy Tranvik and Bruno Latour, propose a hybrid approach to understanding the role of science and technology in contemporary culture. Tranvik argues that merging determinism and constructionism can show a more accurate depiction of reality, and in Aramis, or The Love of Technology Latour illustrates that technology and society co-develop. The combination of these two claims is a good starting point to further understand the powerful process of knowledge production, as it shapes and is shaped by the sciences, emerging technology, resource management, and environmental value. This thesis argues that a reflexive relationship unfolded between the use of pteropods in the sciences, and their role in popular representation. Marine researchers assigned value to pteropods according to their research goals and the technologies available, which constrained the questions researchers asked about pteropods. That process of knowledge generation influenced the emergence of pteropods in popular representation. How the value of pteropods were represented in turn influenced the very process of scientific inquiry that made pteropods real, and valuable to begin with. In the case of groundfish, in the same way that policy and economy acted as constraining factors, so too have the complex relationships between scientific inquiry, technological choice, and data within the traditional ecological inference paradigm. The datasets needed to move the predictive power of the sciences forward was not available, so they had no incentive to develop them further. In turn, if management could not incorporate new datasets (like the ones collected nearshore, or with video), there was no incentive to make new, possibly better datasets available. This caused an iterative process of mutual stagnation between ecological inference and environmental decision making. An additional chapter provides analysis of the authors own approach to knowledge generation and future directions for critical ocean studies. For example, experiences on interdisciplinary research projects, and the exploration of mixed methods in individual scholarship, provided unique opportunities to apply both traditional and non-traditional humanities methods to the study of political ecology, which has until recently been dominated by the field of geography. As the ocean is made knowable through the sciences, studying the enigma of scientific production is critical to understanding the politics of nature. Political ecology, it turns out, has nothing to do with the environment separate from us, out there somewhere. Instead it engages with how the ocean is measured, represented, and composed; how it is taken into account, and put into order. ©Copyright by Samantha Newton December 11, 2018 All Rights Reserved The Space Between: How We Understood, Valued, and Governed the Ocean Through the Process of Marine Science and Emerging Technologies by Samantha Newton A THESIS submitted to Oregon State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts Presented December 11, 2018 Commencement June 2019 Master of Arts thesis of Samantha Newton presented on December 11, 2018 APPROVED: Major Professor, representing Environmental Arts and Humanities Director of the Environmental Arts and Humanities Dean of the Graduate School I understand that my thesis will become part of the permanent collection of Oregon State University libraries. My signature below authorizes release of my thesis to any reader upon request. Samantha Newton, Author ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS The author expresses sincere appreciation to the many faculty of Oregon State University that helped me on my way including my committee (Jake Hamblin, Ray Malewitz, Lorenzo Ciannelli, and GCR Chris Langdon) as well as others that made my work possible through mentorship and support like Al Shay, Alix Gitelman, Ana Spalding, Brenda McCullough, Charles Robinson, Dana Warren, Flaxen Conway, Fuxin Li, Julia Jones, Julie Green, Lissy Goralnik, Michael Nelson, and Ricardo Letellier. Additionally, the author would like to especially thank Environmental Arts and Humanities Program Manager Carly Lettero for her unconditional leadership, friendship, and mentorship; her abundant support was incredibly meaningful. Special thanks also goes to Barbara Muraca for making the time to guide me through the bottomless abyss that is Bruno Latour. Thank you also to: The Department of Microbiology and Steve Giovannoni for trusting me with your worlds and forever altering the trajectory of my creative practice and scholarship; to the School of Art and Communication, for taking a chance on me (I hope you see that as a win as much as I did); to the Environmental Arts and Humanities initiative for giving me the space to take academic and creative risks; and finally to the College of Earth, Ocean, and Atmospheric Science for including this environmental humanities student in efforts to better understand and communicate changing ocean conditions. I am grateful to Amy Maas, the Bermuda Institute of Ocean Science, David Murphy, and the National Academies’ Keck Futures Initiative for orchestrating and funding Swimming in Sea Butterflies, and to the National Science Foundation’s National Research Traineeship fellowship for funding Emerging Technologies in Fisheries Science. Kudos to the anonymous professors, peers, and mentors (you know who you are) that accepted me—with my rough edges and big dreams—and encouraged me to push boundaries and question dominate paradigms of knowledge and scholarship. CONTRIBUTION OF AUTHORS Chapters three and four were completed in partial fulfillment of the OSU NRT program in Risk and Uncertainty quantification in marine science and policy (an author contributions visual can be found in Figure 20). Chapter three was co-authored by Katlyn Haven and Alrik Firl. Although I am the primary author for all the text in chapter four, some of the work I discuss was made possible through collaboration with Haven and Firl. TABLE OF CONTENTS Page Chapter One: Introduction ............................................................................................................1 Taking the Oceanic Turn .............................................................................................1 Concepts and Applications ..........................................................................................6 Chapter Two: Pteropods Realized ..............................................................................................14 Swimming in Sea Butterflies: An Interdisciplinary Approach ......................................14 Changing Ocean Conditions ......................................................................................16 Pteropods as Bio-Indicators .......................................................................................25 Seeing Pteropods ......................................................................................................32 Chapter Two Summary .............................................................................................50 Chapter Three: Groundfish Realized ..........................................................................................54 The Measurement and Management of Fish: An Interdisciplinary Approach .................54 The Value of Northeastern Pacific Groundfish in Oregon ............................................56 Measuring Groundfish (Part I): Institutions ................................................................63 Measuring Fish (Part II): Individuals ..........................................................................66 Managing Fish (Part I): Best Scientific Information Available .....................................74 Managing Fish (Part II): Fish Under Risk ..................................................................80 Chapter Three Summary ...........................................................................................83 Chapter Four: Critical Ocean Studies .........................................................................................85 An Essay on Interdisciplinary and Amodern Approaches to Political Ecology ..............85 Forming and Articulating Collectives .........................................................................88 Approaching the Gordian Knot (Part I): Together .......................................................95 Approaching the Gordian Knot (Part II): Individually ...............................................104 Chapter Four Summary ...........................................................................................108