Colonial Legacies, Contemporary Imaginaries, and the Space surrounding Oil
and Gas Extraction Sites and Offices
American Anthropological Association (AAA) Annual Meeting, Montreal,
November 16-20 2011,
Panel Organizer: Rémy Rouillard, PhD Candidate, McGill University
Fossil fuels allow us to move, as much as they fuel the material and
immaterial dreams of individuals, the ambitions of nation-states, and the
financial aspirations of the oil and gas industry. Yet, it is in the
interests of oil and gas companies to limit not only the flow of information
concerning the status of their reserves, but also the circulation of people
in and around the security perimeters surrounding their extraction sites and
head offices. This panel aims to bring together papers focused on the
imaginaries enveloping those located on either side of the secured zones of
oil and gas companies, be they delimited by physical barriers, surveillance,
or psychological barriers. Since interactions across this divide either tend
to be limited, or take place at higher political, economic, or
administrative levels, it is important to understand how people located
within and close to extraction sites make sense of what is happening on the
other side of the "fence", for example, through prejudice, rumor, or in
face-to-face interactions. These discourses and encounters are often partly
rooted in legacies of conquest and colonization, in the way that states
relate to oil-producing regions and their inhabitants, or in the traces
previously left by extractive industries. This panel seeks papers that
address (but are not limited to) the following issues:
- Ways of relating to spaces / places /landscapes on either side of the
security perimeters of extraction sites or offices;
- Perceptions of oil and gas workers and/or administrators about their
companies and industry, on their lived experience in the oilfields or
offices, on how they imagine or think about their distant "home", and on how
they view local inhabitants where oil or gas are extracted, as well as the
environment they live in;
- Traces left by (internal) colonization in the local population's
collective memory, as well as in the surrounding environment;
- The ways in which individuals and communities imagine their futures with
extractive industries, as well as without them when extracting operations
cease.
If you are interested, please send your paper abstracts to Rémy Rouillard
by email at remy.rouillard@mail.mcgill.ca by April 7th 2011.
For more information concerning the AAA Annual Meeting, please see the link
below:
http://www.aaanet.org/meetings/2011-AAA-Annual-Meeting.cfm
