Sami Hammana (NL) is member of Team North Sea Politics & Policy in the School of Dogger Bank. Sami is an artist and educator whose practice and educational work are primarily concerned with the limits of perception. His artistic approaches often result in filmic and textual work. In the case of his educational work, Hammana has been building and developing multiple courses and programmes that defy categorisation in collective study. Hammana has been leading the Honours Programme at the Willem de Kooning Academie since 2018.
Technocracy isn’t necessarily a bad thing.
RESEARCH PERSPECTIVE: THE DUTCH DOGGER BANK POLICY PLAN
I am working on the ‘Technocracy’ case within the research team North Sea Politics and Policy. I understand the term to broadly mean governance based on technical expertise. Initially I set out to think through the language used in technocratic contexts. I asked the question: What terms and vocabularies reflect the technocratic language used within the context of the Dogger Bank? This interest led to contributing to the Dogger Bank Reading Club, where the aim is to collectively read through the Dutch Dogger Bank policy plan. In the first session of the reading club we used a ‘collective slow reading’ method, which means that every participant reads out a single sentence, moving in a clockwise direction, before giving the group a chance to respond. One of the responses can be paraphrased as: ‘There are healthy and unhealthy forms of Technocracy’. This led me to realise that technocracy isn’t necessarily a bad thing. The research will continue through testing out reading methods and by making further findings of the project public. The aim is to collate all of that material and to work towards a(n) (essay-)film project that encapsulates the complexity of Dogger Bank Technocracy.
