- Email: [email protected]
Boom and bust methodology: Opportunities and challenges with conducting research at sites of resource extraction
G Model EXIS 128 No. of Pages 3
The Extractive Industries and Society xxx (2015) xxx–xxx
Contents lists available at ScienceDirect
The Extractive Industries and Society journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/exis
Viewpoint
Boom and bust methodology: Opportunities and challenges with conducting research at sites of resource extraction Jeffrey Jenkinsa,* , Karie Booneb , Kai Bosworthc , Jessi Lehmanc, Thomas Loderd a
Department of Environmental Studies, University of California, 1156 High Street, Santa Cruz, CA 95064, USA Department of Geosciences, Colorado State University, Fort Collins, CO 80523, USA c Department of Geography, Environment and Society, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN 55455, USA d Department of Geography, Texas A&M University, College Station, TX 77843, USA b
A R T I C L E I N F O
A B S T R A C T
Article history: Received 9 June 2015 Received in revised form 6 July 2015
Researchers conducting fieldwork at sites of resource extraction experience unique challenges associated with methodology, such as subjectivity and positionality. These challenges are further amplified through the boom and bust nature of extraction. However, these rapidly changing physical and political landscapes also give way to unique opportunities to engage with communities undergoing socioeconomic change. Commentary from researchers working in communities impacted by the development of hydraulic fracturing activity and associated infrastructure highlights the tensions and perspectives that emerge from institutional permanency, knowledge of the subterranean, oral histories, and family ties. Although these cases focus on fieldwork conducted in the American west, it is our hope that this commentary may further the discussion of issues related to boom and bust methodology to sites of resource extraction beyond North America. ã 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Available online xxx Keywords: Field research Hydraulic fracturing Positionality Subjectivity American west
1. Introduction Conducting fieldwork in communities affected by resource extraction involves a complex negotiation of institutional networks, historical antecedents, subterranean materialities, and researcher positionality. The need to review the politics of knowledge and inquiry used by most research frameworks and their associated power imbalances has been repeatedly called for within geography literature (Katz, 1994; Kobayashi and Peake,1994; Koster et al., 2012; de Leeuw et al., 2012). However, boom and bust landscapes (Hostetter, 2011) often include the additional challenges of rapid socio-economic, environmental, and institutional changes, contributing to even more complicated, emotionally charged, and potentially dangerous research conditions. Fieldwork that informs a political ecology of the subsoil involves the sites of resource extraction and associated infrastructure undergoing change through the multiple stages of development and decline; from exploration to environmental review, construction, operation, economic decline, and post-operational monitoring (Bebbington and Bury, 2013; Pasqualetti, 1997). In the American west these extractive energy
industries compete with existing ‘old west’ and ‘new west’ economies for claims to the economic value and social values associated with landscape (Duane, 1999; Walker and Fortmann, 2003). The researcher’s social license to operate in communities impacted by resource extraction is thus contingent on participant knowledge of socio-economic, environmental and institutional change of extractive booms and busts. In what follows, we discuss some of the challenges and opportunities with conducting fieldwork at sites of resource extraction. Karie Boone discusses the relative institutional permanence of water rights amid impermanent hydraulic fracturing booms; Kai Bosworth discusses the materiality of subterranean knowledge, the infrastructural change that can lead affected publics to contest, and how the physical landscape perceived as natural can obscure struggle; Jessi Lehman discusses the role that oral histories play in recreating the daily practices of life amid the seemingly distemporal practice of extraction; and Thomas Loder discusses researcher positionality when tensions arise among family relations between surface property claims and subsurface royalties. 2. Extractive impermanence, institutional permanence
* Corresponding author. E-mail address: [email protected] (J. Jenkins).
Ethnographic research aims to inform contextually relevant policy and depends on how a social license to operate as a researcher
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.exis.2015.07.001 2214-790X/ ã 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Please cite this article in press as: J. Jenkins, et al., Boom and bust methodology: Opportunities and challenges with conducting research at sites of resource extraction, Extr. Ind. Soc. (2015), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.exis.2015.07.001
G Model EXIS 128 No. of Pages 3
2
J. Jenkins et al. / The Extractive Industries and Society xxx (2015) xxx–xxx
is granted in order to access the diverse contexts of the region. For instance, embedding oneself as an active participant into the Colorado water community in order to study hydraulic fracturing issues broaches the topic of membership and consideration of the “insider” affiliation phenomenon for ethnographic research methodologies. Adler and Adler (1987) define membership across a continuum of varying amounts of participation from peripheral to a committed convert. This level of integration challenges a subject– object dualism or the belief that the subject (knower) and the object (known) can be separated through scientific procedure (Adler and Adler, 1987). This has implications for the type of data collected and the way in which the researcher perceives and portrays reality. Building on the idea of membership roles, Billo and Mountz (2015) write that ethnography will always invite betrayal since we build relationships, become embedded in a community and access perspectives that would not otherwise be made public. Future funding as well as credibility in the community of study depends on the work we carry out as a partial insider in these communities. How to do this while publishing credible and reliable research findings are a conversation worth pursuing. In addition, the study of water institutions in nexus with boom and bust cycle industries means that we must attend to the challenges of rapid socio-economic, environmental, and institutional changes prevalent with the increased pace and scale of oil and gas development. These consistent fluctuations challenge the ability to put parameters on a study, or know when to cut off data collection. For example, interview data saturation may be compromised when the individual or institution’s experience is in a parallel flux with booms and busts. Studying the institution of water rights as a case study is one way to confront this shift. Water rights under the system of prior appropriation are a rather stable, relatively unchanging institution in Colorado. Over the years numerous bills, initiatives, and multi-stakeholder groups have attempted to create flexibility within the institution of water rights with few formal successes. For all the critiques against this lack of flexibility in meeting the needs of population growth, increasing environmental flows and industrial uses, the state centric model of resource management offers a sense of stability, access to public employee experience, and longitudinal data that grounds the unpredictable boom and bust cycles. In this way, the process of water access and allocation becomes the unit of analysis (Yin, 2008), boom or bust, effectively addressing challenges associated with unpredictability. 3. Subterranean knowledge Regimes of extraction survive and grow by managing the relationship between the known and the unknown, the said and unsaid, presence and absence. Environmental review processes, public engagement, and media reports all contribute to a general asymmetry of information available to different actors—especially the different ‘affected publics’ created by extraction. In order to challenge extraction and infrastructure projects for any variety of reasons, publics are enrolled in extensive environmental knowledge controversies which centrally rely on unequal distributions of not only the material impacts of extraction like pollution and wealth, but also expertise and knowledge (Whatmore, 2009). This knowledge is especially sensitive in volatile markets of so-called natural resources, which could be drastically affected by resource estimates, knowledge of spills or accidents. Consequently, in an era where corporate social responsibility has promised access to more evidence than ever before (Barry, 2013), it can become difficult to find the absences in the archive, the stories untold, and the plot holes in the accepted narratives. While many of us are reliant on both contemporary and historical archival research, our awareness to the limits and
excesses of this research is heightened in the study of resource extraction in the American west for two reasons. The first is that with increased funds for counterterrorism activities, the ‘affected publics’ are increasingly labeled by their local and state governments and media as terrorists to simultaneously support both cash-starved local and state governments and corporate-funded infrastructure projects. For example, the relatively unpopulous states of South and North Dakota, Wyoming and Montana have all received among the most in per capita money from the Department of Homeland Security. In South Dakota, one justification for this money has been the possibility that environmentalists or ‘eco-terrorists’ will sabotage uranium mines or the Keystone XL pipeline. Consequently, for researchers and activists alike, Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests have become a useful way to obtain and disseminate knowledge. The second reason the subterranean holes of the archive appear all the more apparent to us is that the archives of the West are not only written by hand and pen, but also inscribed in bodies and landscapes themselves subject to erosion and decay. The differential materialities of windswept plains and mountains can only appear natural by rendering invisible the anthropobioturbation characteristic of the Anthropocene (Zalasiewicz et al., 2014) and its past and contemporary injustices. For these reasons, attention to the material worlds (Bakker and Bridge, 2006) of holes, pores, and permeable spaces could help undermine the contemporary distributions of knowledge, expertise, and power upheld through resource extraction projects. 4. Daily life and distemporal processes of extraction The constantly changing nature of many sites of resource extraction can be challenging for researchers. Castree (2009) and others remind us that spatio-temporalities, such as boom and bust cycles, constitute the very form of modern capitalism. But how can researchers account for the lived realities of these space-times? The Bakken Oral History Project was conducted in June and July 2015 by a team of researchers from the University of Minnesota, in collaboration with the North Dakota Historical Society (NDHS). As cultural and resource geographers, we were particularly interested in the perspectives of workers in oil and related industries: their motivations for coming to North Dakota, their experiences there, and their long-term plans and goals. By working with the NDHS, we hoped to help public historians chronicle this unique period of the state’s (and nation’s) history, and to allow our interviewees to tell their own stories as part of the public record in order to lend permanence to an otherwise impermanent phenomenon. Part of what makes this method interesting and useful is the contested and collective nature of memory and storytelling, which might be powerfully brought to bear on circumstances of resource extraction (Abrams, 2010; Leavy, 2011; Thomson, 2007). Additionally, oral histories can elucidate some of the complex economic forces that influence decision-making, and connect them to the social relations that suffuse and structure oil booms and other phenomena (Thomson, 1999). Our project required adapting some of the conventions of oral histories to account for the conditions of the oil fields, in particular the relatively short amount of time we had with each interviewee (Leavy, 2011). Yet, using oral histories to put the oil boom in the context of workers’ lives helped us to connect the Bakken with seemingly distant economic and social conditions. It showed diverse yet also connected experiences of those who had come to North Dakota from all over the world. But perhaps most of all, the Bakken Oral History project led us to think about making history in the midst of an oil boom, a situation structured by both long-dead and not-yet-recorded histories as well as complex spatio-temporalities of institutional, infrastructural, and environmental change.
Please cite this article in press as: J. Jenkins, et al., Boom and bust methodology: Opportunities and challenges with conducting research at sites of resource extraction, Extr. Ind. Soc. (2015), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.exis.2015.07.001
G Model EXIS 128 No. of Pages 3
J. Jenkins et al. / The Extractive Industries and Society xxx (2015) xxx–xxx
5. Positionality and family ties When framing social science field research, we find ourselves at once trying to craft an unbiased narrative, while simultaneously attempting to understand our own entanglements with landscape, people and processes. In Giving an Account of Oneself, Butler (2005) argues that narration is not a detached, impartial exercise, but a reflection of one’s entanglement with the story’s setting, characters and milieu. Many of these entanglements are longstanding with family connections dating back to frontier expansionism and original acquisition of surface rights through homesteading, as well as continual involvement in local and statewide politics. However, the expansion of hydraulic fracturing has reshaped these entanglements in a major way with researchers having family members who have profited from subsurface mineral holdings due to the expansion of the oil complex (Watts, 2005). As one quickly learns in the field, nearly everyone acknowledges that fracking good comes with fracking bad, the most common assertion being a variant of, “the oil industry is dirty and dangerous and that’s why it pays well.” Yet despite this, few favor regulation of the industry for fear that it will cripple the economic growth that brings positive attention to a muchmaligned state. Such sentiment partially explains why the local anti-fracking movement is lackluster; few think that rocking the boat too much is worth the risk. Such arguments cause us as researchers to question our own previously absolutist anti-fracking stance: Is fracking that bad? Is it acceptable in rural North Dakota? Would it be more painful to ban it outright or let the boom bust on its own? We find ourselves wondering whether we are capable of asking tough questions both out of fear of alienating informants and becoming hypocrites. Fracking is no longer a black and white issue and neither is the landscape “innocent.” Instead, the harder questions concern how fracking changes the character of North Dakota over the long term, a topic that few have been willing to seriously address until the recent production slump. While we still have serious reservations about fracking, we realize that the extractive industries are inherently about boom and bust. Thus, understanding efforts to plan for these cycles and the various stakeholder networks that persist throughout the course of change is an important motivator of research that may compliment case studies which focus on themes such as contestation, adaptation, or institutional change. 6. Conclusion Several important points that were discussed highlight the commonalities that are distinct to conducting fieldwork in communities currently undergoing extractive change. Perhaps the most clear is that extractive change is rapid, and with the rapid change comes unknowns. In turn, these unknowns create uncertainty, uncertainty in scientific fact, uncertainty in income, and uncertainty about whether environmental resources that once existed will continue to be accessible. We as researchers go at length to point out and frame this change and uncertainty, but at the same time we are part of this change, and quite often seen as figures with uncertain motives. Therefore, a boom and bust research ethic should require vested interests in the conditions of the community and what outcomes may ensue. In the minds of many, a calculated, pragmatic, and neutral approach to community research is key to unraveling the intertwined and changing assemblages of people, infrastructure, capital, and the state that are outside the influence of the researcher. However, those
3
conducting boom and bust research would be greatly aided by heeding the aforementioned perspectives, and in doing so adopt a more relativist approach that recognizes the often unseen role the researcher plays as part of the community, in producing knowledge, being affected, and empowering others to be advocates. Acknowledgments We would like to acknowledge and give thanks to a panel first organized for the 2014 Association of American Geographers annual meeting, “Methodology Issues at Sites of Resource Booms” by Katherine MacDonald, Ryan Hackett, and Sara Jackson of York University. Discussion for this opinion piece was generated at a panel organized for the 2015 Association of American Geographers meeting in Chicago, “Boom and bust methodology: Opportunities and challenges with conducting research at sites of resource extraction”. Panelists built on the discussions of the previous year’s theme by bringing the regional focus back home to sites of resource extraction in the American west and focusing specifically on energy extraction issues. The corresponding author would like to acknowledge financial support from SCWIBLES fellowship NSF GK-12 DGE-0947923 for the time afforded to organize and carryout the conference session leading to this publication. References Abrams, L., 2010. Oral History Theory. Routledge, New York. Adler, P.A., Adler, P., 1987. Membership Roles in Field Research. Sage Publications, Newbury Park, CA. Bakker, K., Bridge, G., 2006. Material worlds? Resource geographies and ‘the matter of nature’. Prog. Hum. Geogr. 30 (1), 5–27. Barry, A., 2013. Material Politics: Disputes Along the Pipeline. Wiley–Blackwell, Oxford. Subterranean Struggles: New Dynamics of Mining, Oil, and Gas in Latin America. In: Bebbington, A., Bury, J. (Eds.), University of Texas Press, Austin. Billo, E., Mountz, A., 2015. For institutional ethnography: geographical approaches to institutions and the everyday. Prog. Hum. Geogr. 1–22 0309132515572269. Butler, J., 2005. Giving an Account of Oneself. Fordham University Press, New York, NY. Castree, N., 2009. The spatio-temporality of capitalism. Time Soc. 18 (1), 26–61. de Leeuw, S., Cameron, E.S., Greenwood, M.L., 2012. Participatory and communitybased research, indigenous geographies, and the spaces of friendship: a critical engagement. Can. Geogr. 56 (2), 180–194. Duane, T.P., 1999. Shaping the Sierra: Nature, Culture, and Conflict in the Changing West. University of California Press, Oakland. Hostetter, E., 2011. Boomtown landscapes. Mater. Cult. 43 (2), 59–79. Katz, C., 1994. Playing the field: questions of fieldwork in geography. Prof. Geogr. 46 (1), 67–72. Kobayashi, A., Peake, L., 1994. Unnatural discourse. ‘Race’ and gender in geography. Gend. Place Cult. 1 (2), 225–243. Koster, R., Baccar, K., Lemelin, R.H., 2012. Moving from research ON, to research WITH and FOR Indigenous communities: a critical reflection on communitybased participatory research. Can. Geogr. 56 (2), 195–210. Leavy, P., 2011. Oral History. Oxford University Press, New York. The Evolving Landscape: Homer Aschmann’s Geography. In: Pasqualetti, M.J. (Ed.), Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore. Thomson, A., 1999. Moving stories: oral history and migration studies. Oral Hist. 27 (1), 24–37. Thomson, A., 2007. Four paradigm transformations in oral history. Oral Hist. Rev. 34 (1), 49–70. Walker, P., Fortmann, L., 2003. Whose landscape? A political ecology of the ‘exurban’ Sierra. Cult. Geogr. 10 (4), 469–491. Watts, M.J., 2005. Righteous oil? Human rights, the oil complex, and corporate social responsibility. Annu. Rev. Environ. Nat. Resour. 30, 373–407. Whatmore, S.J., 2009. Mapping knowledge controversies: science, democracy, and the redistribution of expertise. Prog. Hum. Geogr. 33 (5), 587–598. Yin, R., 2008. Case Study Research: Design and Methods, fourth ed. Sage Publications, London. Zalasiewicz, J., Waters, C.N., Williams, M., 2014. Human bioturbation and the subterranean landscape of the Anthropocene. Anthropocene Rev. 6, 3–9.
Please cite this article in press as: J. Jenkins, et al., Boom and bust methodology: Opportunities and challenges with conducting research at sites of resource extraction, Extr. Ind. Soc. (2015), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.exis.2015.07.001
The Extractive Industries and Society xxx (2015) xxx–xxx
Contents lists available at ScienceDirect
The Extractive Industries and Society journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/exis
Viewpoint
Boom and bust methodology: Opportunities and challenges with conducting research at sites of resource extraction Jeffrey Jenkinsa,* , Karie Booneb , Kai Bosworthc , Jessi Lehmanc, Thomas Loderd a
Department of Environmental Studies, University of California, 1156 High Street, Santa Cruz, CA 95064, USA Department of Geosciences, Colorado State University, Fort Collins, CO 80523, USA c Department of Geography, Environment and Society, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN 55455, USA d Department of Geography, Texas A&M University, College Station, TX 77843, USA b
A R T I C L E I N F O
A B S T R A C T
Article history: Received 9 June 2015 Received in revised form 6 July 2015
Researchers conducting fieldwork at sites of resource extraction experience unique challenges associated with methodology, such as subjectivity and positionality. These challenges are further amplified through the boom and bust nature of extraction. However, these rapidly changing physical and political landscapes also give way to unique opportunities to engage with communities undergoing socioeconomic change. Commentary from researchers working in communities impacted by the development of hydraulic fracturing activity and associated infrastructure highlights the tensions and perspectives that emerge from institutional permanency, knowledge of the subterranean, oral histories, and family ties. Although these cases focus on fieldwork conducted in the American west, it is our hope that this commentary may further the discussion of issues related to boom and bust methodology to sites of resource extraction beyond North America. ã 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Available online xxx Keywords: Field research Hydraulic fracturing Positionality Subjectivity American west
1. Introduction Conducting fieldwork in communities affected by resource extraction involves a complex negotiation of institutional networks, historical antecedents, subterranean materialities, and researcher positionality. The need to review the politics of knowledge and inquiry used by most research frameworks and their associated power imbalances has been repeatedly called for within geography literature (Katz, 1994; Kobayashi and Peake,1994; Koster et al., 2012; de Leeuw et al., 2012). However, boom and bust landscapes (Hostetter, 2011) often include the additional challenges of rapid socio-economic, environmental, and institutional changes, contributing to even more complicated, emotionally charged, and potentially dangerous research conditions. Fieldwork that informs a political ecology of the subsoil involves the sites of resource extraction and associated infrastructure undergoing change through the multiple stages of development and decline; from exploration to environmental review, construction, operation, economic decline, and post-operational monitoring (Bebbington and Bury, 2013; Pasqualetti, 1997). In the American west these extractive energy
industries compete with existing ‘old west’ and ‘new west’ economies for claims to the economic value and social values associated with landscape (Duane, 1999; Walker and Fortmann, 2003). The researcher’s social license to operate in communities impacted by resource extraction is thus contingent on participant knowledge of socio-economic, environmental and institutional change of extractive booms and busts. In what follows, we discuss some of the challenges and opportunities with conducting fieldwork at sites of resource extraction. Karie Boone discusses the relative institutional permanence of water rights amid impermanent hydraulic fracturing booms; Kai Bosworth discusses the materiality of subterranean knowledge, the infrastructural change that can lead affected publics to contest, and how the physical landscape perceived as natural can obscure struggle; Jessi Lehman discusses the role that oral histories play in recreating the daily practices of life amid the seemingly distemporal practice of extraction; and Thomas Loder discusses researcher positionality when tensions arise among family relations between surface property claims and subsurface royalties. 2. Extractive impermanence, institutional permanence
* Corresponding author. E-mail address: [email protected] (J. Jenkins).
Ethnographic research aims to inform contextually relevant policy and depends on how a social license to operate as a researcher
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.exis.2015.07.001 2214-790X/ ã 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Please cite this article in press as: J. Jenkins, et al., Boom and bust methodology: Opportunities and challenges with conducting research at sites of resource extraction, Extr. Ind. Soc. (2015), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.exis.2015.07.001
G Model EXIS 128 No. of Pages 3
2
J. Jenkins et al. / The Extractive Industries and Society xxx (2015) xxx–xxx
is granted in order to access the diverse contexts of the region. For instance, embedding oneself as an active participant into the Colorado water community in order to study hydraulic fracturing issues broaches the topic of membership and consideration of the “insider” affiliation phenomenon for ethnographic research methodologies. Adler and Adler (1987) define membership across a continuum of varying amounts of participation from peripheral to a committed convert. This level of integration challenges a subject– object dualism or the belief that the subject (knower) and the object (known) can be separated through scientific procedure (Adler and Adler, 1987). This has implications for the type of data collected and the way in which the researcher perceives and portrays reality. Building on the idea of membership roles, Billo and Mountz (2015) write that ethnography will always invite betrayal since we build relationships, become embedded in a community and access perspectives that would not otherwise be made public. Future funding as well as credibility in the community of study depends on the work we carry out as a partial insider in these communities. How to do this while publishing credible and reliable research findings are a conversation worth pursuing. In addition, the study of water institutions in nexus with boom and bust cycle industries means that we must attend to the challenges of rapid socio-economic, environmental, and institutional changes prevalent with the increased pace and scale of oil and gas development. These consistent fluctuations challenge the ability to put parameters on a study, or know when to cut off data collection. For example, interview data saturation may be compromised when the individual or institution’s experience is in a parallel flux with booms and busts. Studying the institution of water rights as a case study is one way to confront this shift. Water rights under the system of prior appropriation are a rather stable, relatively unchanging institution in Colorado. Over the years numerous bills, initiatives, and multi-stakeholder groups have attempted to create flexibility within the institution of water rights with few formal successes. For all the critiques against this lack of flexibility in meeting the needs of population growth, increasing environmental flows and industrial uses, the state centric model of resource management offers a sense of stability, access to public employee experience, and longitudinal data that grounds the unpredictable boom and bust cycles. In this way, the process of water access and allocation becomes the unit of analysis (Yin, 2008), boom or bust, effectively addressing challenges associated with unpredictability. 3. Subterranean knowledge Regimes of extraction survive and grow by managing the relationship between the known and the unknown, the said and unsaid, presence and absence. Environmental review processes, public engagement, and media reports all contribute to a general asymmetry of information available to different actors—especially the different ‘affected publics’ created by extraction. In order to challenge extraction and infrastructure projects for any variety of reasons, publics are enrolled in extensive environmental knowledge controversies which centrally rely on unequal distributions of not only the material impacts of extraction like pollution and wealth, but also expertise and knowledge (Whatmore, 2009). This knowledge is especially sensitive in volatile markets of so-called natural resources, which could be drastically affected by resource estimates, knowledge of spills or accidents. Consequently, in an era where corporate social responsibility has promised access to more evidence than ever before (Barry, 2013), it can become difficult to find the absences in the archive, the stories untold, and the plot holes in the accepted narratives. While many of us are reliant on both contemporary and historical archival research, our awareness to the limits and
excesses of this research is heightened in the study of resource extraction in the American west for two reasons. The first is that with increased funds for counterterrorism activities, the ‘affected publics’ are increasingly labeled by their local and state governments and media as terrorists to simultaneously support both cash-starved local and state governments and corporate-funded infrastructure projects. For example, the relatively unpopulous states of South and North Dakota, Wyoming and Montana have all received among the most in per capita money from the Department of Homeland Security. In South Dakota, one justification for this money has been the possibility that environmentalists or ‘eco-terrorists’ will sabotage uranium mines or the Keystone XL pipeline. Consequently, for researchers and activists alike, Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests have become a useful way to obtain and disseminate knowledge. The second reason the subterranean holes of the archive appear all the more apparent to us is that the archives of the West are not only written by hand and pen, but also inscribed in bodies and landscapes themselves subject to erosion and decay. The differential materialities of windswept plains and mountains can only appear natural by rendering invisible the anthropobioturbation characteristic of the Anthropocene (Zalasiewicz et al., 2014) and its past and contemporary injustices. For these reasons, attention to the material worlds (Bakker and Bridge, 2006) of holes, pores, and permeable spaces could help undermine the contemporary distributions of knowledge, expertise, and power upheld through resource extraction projects. 4. Daily life and distemporal processes of extraction The constantly changing nature of many sites of resource extraction can be challenging for researchers. Castree (2009) and others remind us that spatio-temporalities, such as boom and bust cycles, constitute the very form of modern capitalism. But how can researchers account for the lived realities of these space-times? The Bakken Oral History Project was conducted in June and July 2015 by a team of researchers from the University of Minnesota, in collaboration with the North Dakota Historical Society (NDHS). As cultural and resource geographers, we were particularly interested in the perspectives of workers in oil and related industries: their motivations for coming to North Dakota, their experiences there, and their long-term plans and goals. By working with the NDHS, we hoped to help public historians chronicle this unique period of the state’s (and nation’s) history, and to allow our interviewees to tell their own stories as part of the public record in order to lend permanence to an otherwise impermanent phenomenon. Part of what makes this method interesting and useful is the contested and collective nature of memory and storytelling, which might be powerfully brought to bear on circumstances of resource extraction (Abrams, 2010; Leavy, 2011; Thomson, 2007). Additionally, oral histories can elucidate some of the complex economic forces that influence decision-making, and connect them to the social relations that suffuse and structure oil booms and other phenomena (Thomson, 1999). Our project required adapting some of the conventions of oral histories to account for the conditions of the oil fields, in particular the relatively short amount of time we had with each interviewee (Leavy, 2011). Yet, using oral histories to put the oil boom in the context of workers’ lives helped us to connect the Bakken with seemingly distant economic and social conditions. It showed diverse yet also connected experiences of those who had come to North Dakota from all over the world. But perhaps most of all, the Bakken Oral History project led us to think about making history in the midst of an oil boom, a situation structured by both long-dead and not-yet-recorded histories as well as complex spatio-temporalities of institutional, infrastructural, and environmental change.
Please cite this article in press as: J. Jenkins, et al., Boom and bust methodology: Opportunities and challenges with conducting research at sites of resource extraction, Extr. Ind. Soc. (2015), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.exis.2015.07.001
G Model EXIS 128 No. of Pages 3
J. Jenkins et al. / The Extractive Industries and Society xxx (2015) xxx–xxx
5. Positionality and family ties When framing social science field research, we find ourselves at once trying to craft an unbiased narrative, while simultaneously attempting to understand our own entanglements with landscape, people and processes. In Giving an Account of Oneself, Butler (2005) argues that narration is not a detached, impartial exercise, but a reflection of one’s entanglement with the story’s setting, characters and milieu. Many of these entanglements are longstanding with family connections dating back to frontier expansionism and original acquisition of surface rights through homesteading, as well as continual involvement in local and statewide politics. However, the expansion of hydraulic fracturing has reshaped these entanglements in a major way with researchers having family members who have profited from subsurface mineral holdings due to the expansion of the oil complex (Watts, 2005). As one quickly learns in the field, nearly everyone acknowledges that fracking good comes with fracking bad, the most common assertion being a variant of, “the oil industry is dirty and dangerous and that’s why it pays well.” Yet despite this, few favor regulation of the industry for fear that it will cripple the economic growth that brings positive attention to a muchmaligned state. Such sentiment partially explains why the local anti-fracking movement is lackluster; few think that rocking the boat too much is worth the risk. Such arguments cause us as researchers to question our own previously absolutist anti-fracking stance: Is fracking that bad? Is it acceptable in rural North Dakota? Would it be more painful to ban it outright or let the boom bust on its own? We find ourselves wondering whether we are capable of asking tough questions both out of fear of alienating informants and becoming hypocrites. Fracking is no longer a black and white issue and neither is the landscape “innocent.” Instead, the harder questions concern how fracking changes the character of North Dakota over the long term, a topic that few have been willing to seriously address until the recent production slump. While we still have serious reservations about fracking, we realize that the extractive industries are inherently about boom and bust. Thus, understanding efforts to plan for these cycles and the various stakeholder networks that persist throughout the course of change is an important motivator of research that may compliment case studies which focus on themes such as contestation, adaptation, or institutional change. 6. Conclusion Several important points that were discussed highlight the commonalities that are distinct to conducting fieldwork in communities currently undergoing extractive change. Perhaps the most clear is that extractive change is rapid, and with the rapid change comes unknowns. In turn, these unknowns create uncertainty, uncertainty in scientific fact, uncertainty in income, and uncertainty about whether environmental resources that once existed will continue to be accessible. We as researchers go at length to point out and frame this change and uncertainty, but at the same time we are part of this change, and quite often seen as figures with uncertain motives. Therefore, a boom and bust research ethic should require vested interests in the conditions of the community and what outcomes may ensue. In the minds of many, a calculated, pragmatic, and neutral approach to community research is key to unraveling the intertwined and changing assemblages of people, infrastructure, capital, and the state that are outside the influence of the researcher. However, those
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conducting boom and bust research would be greatly aided by heeding the aforementioned perspectives, and in doing so adopt a more relativist approach that recognizes the often unseen role the researcher plays as part of the community, in producing knowledge, being affected, and empowering others to be advocates. Acknowledgments We would like to acknowledge and give thanks to a panel first organized for the 2014 Association of American Geographers annual meeting, “Methodology Issues at Sites of Resource Booms” by Katherine MacDonald, Ryan Hackett, and Sara Jackson of York University. Discussion for this opinion piece was generated at a panel organized for the 2015 Association of American Geographers meeting in Chicago, “Boom and bust methodology: Opportunities and challenges with conducting research at sites of resource extraction”. Panelists built on the discussions of the previous year’s theme by bringing the regional focus back home to sites of resource extraction in the American west and focusing specifically on energy extraction issues. The corresponding author would like to acknowledge financial support from SCWIBLES fellowship NSF GK-12 DGE-0947923 for the time afforded to organize and carryout the conference session leading to this publication. References Abrams, L., 2010. Oral History Theory. Routledge, New York. Adler, P.A., Adler, P., 1987. Membership Roles in Field Research. Sage Publications, Newbury Park, CA. Bakker, K., Bridge, G., 2006. Material worlds? Resource geographies and ‘the matter of nature’. Prog. Hum. Geogr. 30 (1), 5–27. Barry, A., 2013. Material Politics: Disputes Along the Pipeline. Wiley–Blackwell, Oxford. Subterranean Struggles: New Dynamics of Mining, Oil, and Gas in Latin America. In: Bebbington, A., Bury, J. (Eds.), University of Texas Press, Austin. Billo, E., Mountz, A., 2015. For institutional ethnography: geographical approaches to institutions and the everyday. Prog. Hum. Geogr. 1–22 0309132515572269. Butler, J., 2005. Giving an Account of Oneself. Fordham University Press, New York, NY. Castree, N., 2009. The spatio-temporality of capitalism. Time Soc. 18 (1), 26–61. de Leeuw, S., Cameron, E.S., Greenwood, M.L., 2012. Participatory and communitybased research, indigenous geographies, and the spaces of friendship: a critical engagement. Can. Geogr. 56 (2), 180–194. Duane, T.P., 1999. Shaping the Sierra: Nature, Culture, and Conflict in the Changing West. University of California Press, Oakland. Hostetter, E., 2011. Boomtown landscapes. Mater. Cult. 43 (2), 59–79. Katz, C., 1994. Playing the field: questions of fieldwork in geography. Prof. Geogr. 46 (1), 67–72. Kobayashi, A., Peake, L., 1994. Unnatural discourse. ‘Race’ and gender in geography. Gend. Place Cult. 1 (2), 225–243. Koster, R., Baccar, K., Lemelin, R.H., 2012. Moving from research ON, to research WITH and FOR Indigenous communities: a critical reflection on communitybased participatory research. Can. Geogr. 56 (2), 195–210. Leavy, P., 2011. Oral History. Oxford University Press, New York. The Evolving Landscape: Homer Aschmann’s Geography. In: Pasqualetti, M.J. (Ed.), Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore. Thomson, A., 1999. Moving stories: oral history and migration studies. Oral Hist. 27 (1), 24–37. Thomson, A., 2007. Four paradigm transformations in oral history. Oral Hist. Rev. 34 (1), 49–70. Walker, P., Fortmann, L., 2003. Whose landscape? A political ecology of the ‘exurban’ Sierra. Cult. Geogr. 10 (4), 469–491. Watts, M.J., 2005. Righteous oil? Human rights, the oil complex, and corporate social responsibility. Annu. Rev. Environ. Nat. Resour. 30, 373–407. Whatmore, S.J., 2009. Mapping knowledge controversies: science, democracy, and the redistribution of expertise. Prog. Hum. Geogr. 33 (5), 587–598. Yin, R., 2008. Case Study Research: Design and Methods, fourth ed. Sage Publications, London. Zalasiewicz, J., Waters, C.N., Williams, M., 2014. Human bioturbation and the subterranean landscape of the Anthropocene. Anthropocene Rev. 6, 3–9.
Please cite this article in press as: J. Jenkins, et al., Boom and bust methodology: Opportunities and challenges with conducting research at sites of resource extraction, Extr. Ind. Soc. (2015), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.exis.2015.07.001