This event has been canceled by the organizers due to the University of California healthcare, research, and technical employees’ three-day strike, which will begin on February 26. We will let you know if this workshop is rescheduled at a future date.
Over the last two decades, the rise of “nonconventional” fossil-fuel extraction has wildly transformed local landscapes within the North American hinterland, the Earth’s climatic system, and the political-economic balance between northern and southern nations. This workshop is devoted to the critical discussion of two works in progress that aim to theorize the ongoing revolution in non-conventional fossil fuels.
Conventional fossil fuel production has large plateaued since the mid-2000s, yet the development of new methods of extraction — especially SAGD in Canada’s Athabasca deposit and hydraulic fracturing in West Texas’ Permian Basin — delineate the contours of a novel, unstable, and highly destructive energy system. Previous research on these industries has largely focused on activism, environmental health, and financial networks. Yet in the scholarly literature, it remains unclear at which point a shift from conventional to non-conventional fossil fuels heralds the onset of a new energy regime and why such a change matters.
To discuss these questions, Troy Vettese and Cameron Hu will discuss their respective papers on the tar sands and fracking, with Nathaniel Dolton-Thornton as discussant. They draw, variously, upon fieldwork, historical and anthropological methods, and lineages of Marxist and postcolonial thought.
Papers will be pre-circulated to registered participants by February 21. Effective participation in the workshop depends upon the papers being read closely beforehand.
This event is co-sponsored by the Berkeley Workshop in Environmental History.
About the Speakers
Cameron Hu is Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for the Humanities at Wesleyan University. He received a PhD in Anthropology from the University of Chicago, where his dissertation, “Knowing Destroying,” received the 2022 Daniel F. Nugent Prize. His recent articles are published or forthcoming with Social Studies of Science, Cultural Anthropology, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, and Political and Legal Anthropology Review Online, as well as several edited volumes and exhibition catalogues.
Troy Vettese is an environmental historian and Ciriacy-Wantrup research fellow at UC Berkeley. Previously, Vettese has held fellowships at the University of Copenhagen, Harvard University, and the European University Institute. Together with Drew Pendergrass, Vettese co-authored Half-Earth Socialism (Verso 2022), which has been translated into five languages and turned into an educational video game that has been played by 100,000 people. Vettese’s research interests include Marxist theory, animal studies, the history of economic thought, and energy studies. His popular and scholarly work has appeared in The Guardian, n+1, Jacobin, New Left Review, and Contemporary European History.
Nathaniel Dolton-Thornton (discussant) is a PhD student in the Energy and Resources Group at UC Berkeley. He researches the political, economic, and environmental aspects of critical mineral supply chains for energy transitions, with a focus on China and Latin America. He also conducts related research with the Climate Policy Lab in The Fletcher School at Tufts University and the Klinger Lab at the University of Delaware.
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Roselyn Hsueh is a Professor of Political Science at Temple University and Visiting Scholar at the Berkeley Economy and Society Initiative. She is the author of Micro-institutional Foundations of Capitalism: Sectoral Pathways to Globalization in China, India, and Russia (Cambridge, 2022) and China’s Regulatory State: A New Strategy for Globalization (Cornell, 2011), and scholarship on states and markets and industrial policy. Her current research examines the technological intensity of trade and Chinese outward foreign direct investment, and the economic and security nexus in technology governance. She held fellowships at the University of Pennsylvania, Georgetown University, and the University of Southern California. She conducted international fieldwork as a Fulbright Global Scholar, served as a visiting professor at the National Taiwan University, and was a Fulbright visiting scholar at the Institute of World Economics and Politics (China). She received her Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley.
Mark Dallas is temporarily on leave as Professor in the departments of Political Science, Asian Studies and Science, Technology & Society at Union College in New York to serve in the U.S. government. His research focuses on industrial organization, global value chains, China, industrial and technology policy and their economic and security implications. His publications cross multiple disciplines, including in leading journals in business management and technology innovation, geography and development studies. He has also worked with the World Bank in the Trade and International Integration Development Research Group, as a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, and at the Wilson Center. He also was the Hallsworth Visiting Professor at the Global Development Institute at the University of Manchester. All comments made are purely his own as a private citizen, and do not necessarily represent the opinions or positions of the U.S. government.
Rachel E. Stern is a Professor of Law and Political Science (by courtesy) in the Jurisprudence and Social Policy Program at Berkeley Law, where she also currently holds the Pamela P. Fong and Family Distinguished Chair in China Studies. She is the author of Environmental Litigation in China: A Study in Political Ambivalence, as well as numerous articles on legal mobilization, courts, political space and professionalization in contemporary China. Stern is currently working on a comparative project on the politics of access to legal information and the emergent market for court data in China, France and the United States, which explores how different political systems responded to the rise of big data, machine learning and natural language processing in the 2010s. She was previously a Junior Fellow at the Harvard University Society of Fellows.
AnnaLee Saxenian is professor of information and economic development at the University of California, Berkeley. She served as dean of the School of Information from 2004-19. Her scholarship focuses on regional economies and the conditions under which people, ideas, and geographies combine and connect into hubs of economic activity. She is author of Regional Advantage: Culture and Competition in Silicon Valley and Route 128 (Harvard, 1994) and The New Argonauts: Regional Advantage in a Global Economy (Harvard, 2006) and has published widely on the geography and dynamics of industrial change. She chaired the Advisory Committee for Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences at the National Science Foundation from 2010-15. She holds degrees from MIT, UC Berkeley, and Williams College.
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