"Complicity as Method" with Dr Kari Dahlgren

Please join us for a seminar by Dr Kari Dahlgren (Monash University). Associate Professor Monica Minnegal (University of Melbourne) will act as discussant.

Complicity as Method

This paper revisits my ethnographic fieldwork with Australian pro-coal lobbyists, nearly a decade later, to argue that complicity should not be understood solely as an ethical hazard to be managed, but as a productive ethnographic method. I show how it was precisely through participating in the ordinary social worlds of coal lobbyists that I gained access to the ambiguities, critiques and ethical deliberations that shaped their work. Yet reflecting back, I also recognise how my concern with demonstrating critical distance shaped how I interpreted what my informants were telling me, leading me to treat their claims about the material foundations of contemporary life primarily as ideological defence.

Returning to these ethnographic encounters considering more recent scholarship on energy materiality (Fressoz 2026), energy addition (York and Bell 2019), and energy accumulation (Günel 2026), I argue that my fear of appearing complicit constrained what I was able to publicly express. Taking my informants more seriously has since redirected my research from analysing the defence of fossil fuels towards the anthropology of industrial decarbonisation and the material conditions of energy transition. Thus, rather than defending complicity as an unavoidable consequence of fieldwork, I propose it as a methodological orientation that enables anthropology to engage critically with powerful actors while remaining open to the unexpected truths they may reveal. In doing so, I suggest that the greater risk for anthropology is allowing the pursuit of innocence to limit our capacity to understand, and ultimately influence, the futures currently being shaped.

Kari Dahlgren is a Senior Lecturer and ARC DECRA Fellow in Anthropology in the School of Social Sciences at Monash University. Her research brings together the anthropology of energy, futures anthropology, and the study of industrial transformation.

Her recently published monograph, Coal’s Final Void: Extracted Futures and the Everyday Making of the Climate Crisis (2025), draws from ethnographic research in Australian coal regions to trace the complex social, ethical, and political dynamics that sustain fossil fuel economies.  She has an ongoing program of research on energy futures, including collaborative projects with industry and policy partners that explore changing patterns of household energy demand and interdisciplinary scenario-building. She also studies industrial decarbonisation in Australia, revealing how decarbonisation is unfolding through processes of addition and infrastructural layering, in which “old” and “new” systems coexist and intersect. This includes how extractive and fossil fuel industries, materialities, and logics, remain embedded within emerging low-carbon industries and imaginaries.