| The BP Oil Spill defined a vital frontier of knowledge. Unfolding nearly a mile underwater and beyond the pale of easy observation and easy capture, the BP Oil Spill overwhelmed the official understanding of both oil spills and the environment.;This dissertation is an ethnographic analysis of how scientists and federal officials scrambled to get a handle on the largest inadvertent oil spill in human history. Embedded in university laboratories and emergency response teams, this dissertation describes how the BP Oil Spill went from a sprawling mess into a manageable problem by first transforming the ocean into a sort of scientific laboratory. For marine scientists who responded to this oil spill, making sense of the unfolding disaster required them to stabilize an unwieldy field of inquiry, codify novel analytical techniques, and cultivate a new ethos of scientific objectivity under duress. The disaster did not begin as a clearly defined event; it became one through this tremendous labor of science and technology. This dissertation describes this contingent process of objectifying disaster and its rippling social impact. For one, techniques of measuring the oil spill instigated a new understanding of the baseline conditions of life in the Gulf of Mexico and posed new questions of our political, scientific, and ethical relationship to that baseline. That is to say, this oil spill materialized a new version of the environment itself. This reformatted environment fully contained the disaster, insulating the biological reach of this oil spill from human considerations and rendering personal accounts of sickness implausible and illegible to the state. In scholarship, the environment is often taken up either as a background force or a local interpretation. One key argument I make is that the environment also works as a consequential enactment of normal life in scientific practice and statecraft. |
