Description
Book SynopsisThis innovative, interdisciplinary volume provides a new perspective on the material, symbolic, cultural, and social meanings of the multidimensional world of the global oil and gas industry.
Trade ReviewJuxtaposed between the 'intellectual vertigo' induced by this massive industry and 'oil's cynosural politics,' the authors seek to clear away some of the 'epistemic murk' that pervades the worlds of oil and gas (p. 9).... Readers will note a meticulous focus on revealing, demystifying or engaging anew those features of the substance and the industry that have remained mostly out of the purview of examination.... The renewed engagement with oil materialities reveals important aspects of the everyday life of a resource and an industry that is as convoluted as it is complicated, powerful, destructive, ubiquitous, and ambiguous.
-- Amber Murrey * Antipode *
Table of ContentsIntroduction: Oil Talk
Hannah Appel, Arthur Mason, and Michael Watts
Part I. Oil as a Way of Life
1. Oil for Life: The Bureau of Mines and the Biopolitics of the Petroleum Market
Matt Huber
2. Velocity and Viscosity
Peter Hitchcock
3. Deep Oil and Deep Culture in the Russian Urals
Douglas Rogers
4. Oil, Masculinity, and Violence: Egbesu Worship in the Niger Delta of Nigeria
Rebecca Golden Timsar
Part II. The Oil Archive, Expertise, and Strategic Knowledges
5. The Oil Archives
Andrew Barry
6. Securing the Natural Gas Boom: Oil Field Service Companies and Hydraulic Fracturing's Regulatory Exemptions
Sara Wylie
7. Crude Contamination: Law, Science, and Indeterminacy in Ecuador and Beyond
Suzana Sawyer
8. The Image World of Middle Eastern Oil
Mona Damluji
Specters of Oil: An Introduction to the Photographs of Ed Kashi
Michael J. Watts
Photo Essay
Ed Kashi
Part III. Oil Markets: Turbulence, Risk, and Security
9. Near Futures and Perfect Hedges in the Gulf of Mexico
Leigh Johnson
10. Securing Oil: Frontiers, Risk, and Spaces of Accumulated Insecurity
Michael J. Watts
11. Oil Assemblages and the Production of Confusion: Price Fluctuations in Two West African Oil-Producing Economies
Jane I. Guyer
Part IV. Hard and Soft Infrastructures
12. Offshore Work: Infrastructure and Hydrocarbon Capitalism in Equatorial Guinea
Hannah Appel
13. Black Oil Business: Rogue Pipelines, Hydrocarbon Dealers, and the "Economics" of Oil Theft
Elizabeth Gelber
14. The Political Economy of Oil Privatization in Post-Soviet Kazakhstan
Saulesh Yessenova
Part V. Oil Futures and Oil Transitions
15. Carbon, Convertibility, and the Technopolitics of Oil
Hannah Knox
16. Events Collectives: The Social Life of a Promise-Disappointment Cycle
Arthur Mason
17. Reserves, Secrecy, and the Science of Oil Prognostication in Southern Arabia
Mandana E. Limbert
18. Vicious Transparency: Contesting Canada’s Hydrocarbon Future
Anna Zalik
References
Index
