A seminar on the petro-cultural imagination
Overview:
How can the humanities speak in significant ways to science, industry, or even governments about issues dealing with oil, climate change, fracking, or water rights? What is the relationship between the environmental and energy humanities? In what ways do they overlap and differ? These questions serve as guides for our section of this Edinburgh Environmental Humanities Network workshop. Dr Danine Farquharson and Dr Derek Gladwin aim to first discuss their own background in the environmental and energy humanities, and then explain some of the reasons these interdisciplinary areas of study within the humanities have continued to take shape and expand in the twenty-first century. They will then use a specific case study – a successful element of Greenpeace’s campaign against Shell’s attempts to drill in the Arctic, in part satirising the LEGO movie’s theme song ‘Everything is awesome’, that went viral upon its release 8 July 2014 – and offer both an environmental or ‘eco-’ analysis and an energy or ‘petro-’ analysis of this widely viewed piece of media. They will introduce some key issues in both the environmental and energy humanities, but also offer an extensive audience participation period to further examine the Greenpeace advert in order to illuminate many different cross-disciplinary perspectives that might speak to the overlaps, problems, and concerns between energy production and environmentalism. Dr Graeme Macdonald will conclude this workshop session by discussing the ultimate aims and objectives of using cultural resources as forms of energy/resource analysis. Is the ultimate aim of such work to imagine – and help deliver – a transition to a world ‘After Oil’? What might that world look like, according to our (petro)cultural imaginaries?
This event is free.
Speakers:
Danine Farquharson is Associate Professor and Graduate Coordinator of English at Memorial University in St. John’s, Newfoundland. Part of the Petrocultures Research cluster (www.petrocultures.com), her emerging research project in collaboration with colleague Dr. Fiona Polack, “Cold Water Oil,” is devoted to cultural studies of energy. In particular, she examines how the North Atlantic offshore oil and gas industry is imagined in a wide range of high and popular contexts – everything from oil company websites, to documentaries, to literary fiction. Dr. Farquharson is organizing Petrocultures 2016: The Offshore, an international and multidisciplinary conference at Memorial from 31 August to 3 September 2016. Her previous research production has been in contemporary Irish fiction and film; she has published and presented widely on Roddy Doyle, Edna O’Brien, and Liam O’Flaherty.
Graeme Macdonald is an Associate Professor in English and Comparative Literary Studies at University of Warwick. He is editor of Scottish Literature and Postcolonial (EUP 2011) and Post Theory: New directions in Criticism (EUP, 1999). He has recently edited a new edition of John McGrath’s play The Cheviot, the Stag and the Black, Black Oil (2015). He has also published several essays on Petrofiction. Currently he is preparing a monograph: Petroliterature a study of Oil and World Literature. Dr Macdonald is a member of WreC (Warwick Research Collective), who work on new ways to think about World Literature/Literature in the World. The WreC have published a co-written monograph on Peripheral Modernism and World Literature: Combined and Uneven Development: Toward New Theory of World Literature (LUP: 2015).
Derek Gladwin is a SSRCH Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Department of English at the University of British Columbia in Canada. He has authored the forthcoming book, Contentious Terrains: Boglands and the Irish Postcolonial Gothic (Cork UP, 2016), and co-edited two books: Eco-Joyce: The Environmental Imagination of James Joyce (w/ R. Brazeau; Cork UP, 2014) and Unfolding Irish Landscapes: Tim Robinson, Culture, and Environment (w/ C. Cusick; Manchester UP, 2015). In autumn 2015, Dr Gladwin is serving as a Visiting Environmental Humanities Research Fellow through the IASH at the University of Edinburgh, where he is working on his next book titled Spatial Injustice in the North Atlantic Environmental Humanities, which is due out with Routledge in 2016.
