People Capture

Abstract Engineers and similar knowledge workers hold high socio-political status in liberal, settler-colonial, and extractivist Australia. Although ‘carbon capture and storage’ (CCS) has uncertain future relevance for global emissions reduction, newcomers still reach out for desired roles in CCS knowledge work. Drawing on ethnographic study in Eastern Australia, this article centers on expert personhood during the pursuit of professionalism. I argue that two scales of ‘entrapment’ occur for CCS knowledge workers, recursively combining into ‘people capture’ by the industry: Mutuality and complicity emerge between corporate projects and aspirational engineers, who are assigned to build forceful representations (“eyewash”) for wider audiences. When positions of institutionally affirmed expertise are seen as contingent upon the reproduction of specific narratives, knowledge workers are captured into complicity by their own aspirations for self-making.