Dr Mette High

Alliance Director

Mette is a Reader in Social Anthropology at the University of St Andrews, where she also directs the Centre for Energy Ethics. Since 2023, her field research has focused on the United States, specifically the state of Colorado, where fieldwork has taken her out on the rigs in Weld County, into the drilling crew’s field offices, and to the executive headquarters in Denver.

As part of her broad interest in energy industries, commodity markets, and global finance, calculation and risk, she seeks to understand how people in the oil and gas industry make financial and ethical valuations of natural resources. Mette is currently directing a European Research Council-funded project, ‘The Ethics of Oil: Finance Moralities and Environmental Politics in the Global Oil Economy’. Based on multiple ethnographic studies in Europe and the US, this 6-year research project brings an anthropological sensitivity to issues of money, energy and climate change. Its ambition is to provide a novel framework for investigating how oil valuations relate to political reforms and new climate economic initiatives.