Architectures of Oil: Global Perspectives – call for abstracts for panel at AAG conference in Chicago, April 2015

Architectures of Oil: Global Perspectives

Reem Alissa (University of British Columbia) and Mona Damluji (Wheaton College) are organizing one or more sessions for the upcoming AAG conference in Chicago (April 2015). They welcome you to submit an abstract.

Since its discovery in the nineteenth century, oil has transformed modern geographies of power on every continent. The growing scale of oil exploration and extraction by multinational corporations, including but not limited to the so-called Seven Sisters, has shaped the making and remaking of political borders, built environments, and social worlds. The earliest incarnations of the drastic environmental, social, cultural and political impacts of the oil industry began, almost without exception, in the proliferation of oil company towns and industrial infrastructures of derricks, refineries and pipelines. Today, the spatial character of the oil and gas industry includes newer transnational conglomerations of labor and infrastructure such as offshore oil rigs and tar sand refineries.

This AAG session calls for papers that critically address how architectures, landscapes, infrastructures, and geographies of oil have transformed space and society in producing countries. This session invites historically grounded inquires as well as contemporary approaches that examine intersections between the spatial, social, and political dimensions of oil, with an emphasis on regions of the global south. The aim of the session(s) will be to further the development of the field of oil urbanization and draw attention to emerging research in this critical interdisciplinary area.

Please send a proposed title, abstract (250 words) and brief bio (50 words) to Mona Damluji at damluji_mona@wheatoncollege.edu by August 31, 2014.