Join us for a research presentation by PhD Candidate, Èva Cossette-Laneville, in conjunction with the Toxic Life working group.

The aquaculture industry has since its infancy in the 1970s become Norway’s second largest export industry following oil and gas. Amid talks of transitioning away from oil extraction, the Blue Economy discourse is gaining traction, promoting increased production and growth in aquaculture. On a national level, the industry is thus presented as essential for securing sustainable futures thereby also sustaining a particular national imaginary—one in which aquaculture, as a ‘good’ industry, will contribute to ‘good’ coastal futures. In this presentation I ask how such a notion of the ‘good’ is infrastructured at different scales and how this infrastructuring predisposes particular ways of living along the coast. What can infrastructuring mean when articulated locally, in relation to place? Reflecting on my own research practice, I will engage with how a situated engagement may complicate and expose the contradictions that riddle discourses around sustainability transitions, emerging technologies, and extraction.

Èva Cossette-Laneville is a PhD candidate in Cultural Studies at UiT The Arctic University of Norway in Tromsø. Her research explores the potential implications of future developments, such as technological advancements, in the Norwegian aquaculture industry and examines how coastal communities in Northern Norway envision possible futures for both the coast and the industry. With an attention to the material and epistemic infrastructures that legitimise and enable the intensification of fish farming operations, her research engages with locally rooted imaginaries of coastal futures and how they might complicate state- and industry-led visions of sustainability in aquaculture and beyond.