The seminar was organized by the GU Chalmers STS Seminar based on the book Nature-Made Economy: Cod, Capital and the Geat Economization of the Ocean (Asdal and Huse, MIT Press 2023), which offers an exploration of the economization of the ocean through the small modifications that enable great transformations of nature.
In Nature-Made Economy, Kristin Asdal and Tone Huse explore how the ocean has been harnessed to become a space of capital investment and innovation, and how living nature is wrested into the economy even as nature, in turn, resists, adapts to, or changes the economy. The authors’ innovative methodological and conceptual approaches examine the economy by focusing on surprising and numerous “little tools”—such as maps and policy documents, quality patrols, and dietary requirements for the enhancement of species’ biological propensities—that value, direct, reorder, accomplish, and sometimes fail to serve our ends, but also add up to great change.