Extraction

All articles

May 28, 2024

Energy Politics and Discourse in Canada: Probing Progressive Extractivism

Sibo Chen

In this author's note, Sibo Chen introduces his new book, Energy Politics and Discourse in Canada, and its argument about the rise of "progressive extractivism" in Canada. By exploring the conflicting narratives that have shaped the politics of natural gas extraction in British Columbia, Chen shows how progressive rhetoric often masks resource extraction and underscores the multifaceted challenges inherent in balancing the economy, the environment, and Indigenous rights in a fraught energy landscape.

April 5, 2024

Extractive Bargains: Exploring the State-Society Nexus

Paul Bowles and Nathan Andrews

Extractive Bargains: Exploring the State-Society Nexus is a new collection of essays, edited by Paul Bowles and Nathan Andrews, that explores how states are responding to conflicting demands around resource extraction. The book's 16 case studies include countries from both the Global North and Global South, as well as some majority Indigenous states, to understand how "extractive bargains" generate social consensus around resource extraction in different places. The book is the first to analyze in detail and in comparative perspective how states have sought to construct discourses and dialogues designed to support particular extractive policies. It demonstrates, however, that pathways are not pre-determined and that there are possibilities for progressive change.

January 30, 2024

Instagram as Public Pedagogy: Online Activism and the Trans Mountain Pipeline

Carrie Karsgaard

Carrie Karsgaard, Assistant Professor in the Education Department at Cape Breton University, discusses her recent book, Instagram as Public Pedagogy: Online Activism and the Trans Mountain Pipeline. The book uses digital methods to explore the educative potential and limits of social media in anti-pipeline activism.

August 31, 2023

Extraction Ecologies and the Literature of the Long Exhaustion

Elizabeth Carolyn Miller

Elizabeth Carolyn Miller discusses her award-winning book "Extraction Ecologies and the Literature of the Long Exhaustion" and makes the case for literature as a unique record of environmental thought that can help us to understand conceptual transformations in new ways.

August 3, 2023

Vreed-en-Hoop (Peace and Hope): Signpost of the Oil Oligarchy and Political Party Paramountcy in Guyana.

Janette Bulkan

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. 

June 15, 2023

A Social Ecology of Capital

Éric Pineault

In A Social Ecology of Capital, the Canadian social theorist Éric Pineault proposes an original model of the fossil social metabolism that has sustained the growth of advanced capitalism in the last century. Showing how social relations shape the ecology of capital, Pineault highlights the deep contradictions that humanity now faces.

June 1, 2023

Rogues in the Postcolony: Narrating Extraction and Itinerancy in India

Stacey Balkan

What do literary narratives have to do with resource extraction? Quite a lot, according to Stacey Balkan. In her book, Rogues in the Postcolony: Narrating Extraction and Itinerancy in India, Balkan challenges developmentalist narratives pushed by industry through an examination of Anglophone Indian picaresque novels, or “rogue” tales. Looking to novels by writers such as Amitav Ghosh, Indra Sinha, and Aravind Adiga, Balkan reveals startling connections between landscape ideology, agricultural improvement, extractive capitalism, and aesthetic expression in British-occupied Bengal, 1980s Bhopal, and the coal-soaked terrain of contemporary Dhanbad. 

March 24, 2023

Violent Inheritance: Sexuality, Land, and Energy in Making the North American West

E Cram

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.

February 16, 2022

Canadian Oil and Soil: Romantic Nationalism and Eco-Fascism

Adam Carlson

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.

January 10, 2022

As the Hydrocarbon Era Comes to an End, We Need a New Focus for Economics

Bart Hawkins Kreps and Clifford W. Cobb

A new book edited by Bart Hawkins Kreps and Clifford W. Cobb explores the collective transformations that will need to take place in a post-fossil fuel, post-economic growth era.

June 7, 2021

Making Poetry with the “Production Language” of Petrochemical Industry

Max Karpinski

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.

May 17, 2021

The Entangled Histories of Cane and Beet in Ilona Németh: Eastern Sugar

Maja and Reuben Fowkes

Maja and Reuben Fowkes, art historians, curators, and co-directors of the Postsocialist Art Centre at University College London, discuss their new book, Ilona Németh: Eastern Sugar. Through essays, interviews, and artistic interventions, the book examines the decline of sugar beet production in Eastern Europe as synecdoche of post-Soviet transition while reckoning with the entangled histories of sugar, colonialism, and extractivism in the Caribbean and Eastern Europe and suggesting alternate futures.

April 20, 2021

Travelling out of sight? Mapping the flight networks of Canada's gold mining industry

Sydney Hart

Researcher Sydney Hart explains his web-based project to scrutinize the flight networks that support the operations of some of the world's largest gold mining companies. Rather than "flight shaming" individuals, "Mining Maps" shines a light on corporate responsibility for climate change.

February 22, 2021

Education and Extraction

Stacey Balkan

The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted higher education in the United States. Millions of students and faculty have been forced to meet online using digital platforms like Zoom. Literature professor Stacey Balkan argues that Zoom education should not be considered a new normal for the sake of students, faculty, and the planet.

All Articles

Read the latest Energy Humanities articles now.