
On “Extracting Accountability”: Nazli Azergun in Dialogue with Jessica Smith
In her recent book, Extracting Accountability, Jessica Smith focuses on the experiences of petroleum and mining engineers to answer an important question: How do these professionals, who represent and operationalize capitalism’s extractive logic on a daily basis, reconcile their conflicting loyalties to their managers, shareholders, communities, and their ideals? This interview focuses on some of the most important points in the book, such as the pitfalls of stakeholderism. It also presents Smith’s perspective on the intertwining of biography and ethnography, the politics of engineering education and anthropologists’ relevance in it, as well as green energy transition and the conundrum of creating green jobs.