Recent discoveries of large oil reserves are poised to make the small country of Guyana one of the world's largest offshore oil producers. In this EH feature, Janette Bulkan explores the enmeshment of the dominant players from Guyana's old and corrupt natural resources sector (gold) in the new oil boom. In both gold and black gold, the lines between formal and informal, licit and illicit are blurred, with state complicity. Political party interests and private interests, transnational and local interests–all are interwoven for narrow personal gains.
How might we trace the entanglements of logics of energy in the extractivist projects of the North American West with logics of energy in the body? In this author's note, E Cram sketches the personal and historical inheritances that ground their new book, Violent Inheritance: Sexuality, Land and Energy in Making the North American West.
In the final installment in our series on the impact of Timothy Mitchell's "Carbon Democracy," historian Troy Vettese explores Mitchell's unique scholarly method. Vettese argues that the power and originality of Mitchell's books, including "Carbon Democracy," stems from his adoption of approaches from postcolonial studies and Actor Network Theory (ANT). Mitchell has avoided ANT’s tendency to conservatism and has instead practised a radical critique of the economic, environmental, and political structures that he studies.
In the first installment in our series of essays on the impact of Timothy Mitchell's "Carbon Democracy," political scientist Cara Daggett explores why the book works so well in the classroom. Carbon Democracy, Daggett notes, upends influential American mythologies using a writing and analytical style that helps readers see that what we took to be natural fact is indeed contingent and contestable. Students find these moments just as intellectually invigorating as their professors do.
Adam Carlson teases out how the framing of resource development in Canada often supports authoritarian resource rhetoric and policies. The way we talk about "Canadian oil", it turns out, is deeply political and cannot be separated from ongoing histories of resource extraction and dispossession.
Venezuela has a long and complicated relationship with oil marked by cycles of hope and despair. Penélope Plaza of the University of Reading explores how three Venezuelan artists are working to break the spell of oil and help set the country on a new path.
Amid growing calls for a worldwide energy transition, Emily Eaton, Andrew Stevens, and Sean Tucker highlight the possibility of an unjust transition, particularly for workers. Their research on the struggle of oil refinery workers in Regina, Saskatchewan, demonstrates that a just transition will only happen if people fight for it.
There is a growing body of Canadian ecopoetry that takes as its subject the links between oil, land, and colonialism. Poetry scholar Max Karpinski has studied these poets and explains how one of them--Lesley Battler--subtly reuses the bland terminology of the petrochemical industry to create poetic insights into our fossil-fueled condition.
Brent Ryan Bellamy explores what it means to do fieldwork in the energy humanities classroom and reflects on how an "oil inventory" assignment can reorient how students see literature, themselves, and the world.
In 2008, Canadian artist Sandra Sawatzky set out to embroider the social history of oil. Nine years and 17, 000 hours of work later, she completed her epic Black Gold Tapestry, which visualizes our relationship to energy like never before.
Political scientist Amy Janzwood argues that the Biden administration's attempts to curb U.S. demand for oil will likely accelerate the downfall of Alberta's oil sands. The Canadian oil industry faces a choice: either manage that decline or transform.
