Helge Peters was a Visiting Research Fellow with the Program on Science, Technology & Society in 2016. Helge is currently a doctoral candidate in Geography and the Environment at the University of Oxford. His research explores relations between knowledge, power, and materiality in the design and use of computational decision-support tools for environmental governance with a specific focus on fisheries management.
As part of his doctoral studies Helge completed multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork embedded with an international research group developing an agent-based model for decision-support and policy optimisation in the management of global fisheries. His fieldwork documented the material and discursive practices through which scientists perform marine environments as coupled socio-ecological systems amenable to computational formalisation as well as the interactions of science and politics in the production and circulation of policy-relevant expertise.

While at Harvard he intends to draw on materials gathered during fieldwork on the Pacific Coast in order to complete a thesis chapter on the negotiation of multiple environmental knowledges in a regional American fisheries management organisation. This empirical work will prepare the ground for a theoretical reflection on questions of power and accountability issuing forth from the use of predictive social simulation techniques in environmental governance.

Helge’s doctoral research is supported by the Clarendon Fund and St Edmund Hall, both of the University of Oxford, and by the UK Economic and Social Research Council. Before coming to Oxford he studied with a scholarship from the German Academic Exchange Fund for an MA (dist.) in Media and Communications at Goldsmiths, University of London. He holds a BA in Communications from the Berlin University of the Arts.