Doctoral Dissertation Research: A History of Oil Infrastructures: Commodity Production and Consumption

New York University, New York NY

Investigators

Abstract

This award supports a doctoral dissertation research project on the history of infrastructures of oil, meaning the designate socio-technical assemblages designed to transport oil, to enable the exchange of other commodities via petroleum-powered transportation technologies, and to absorb and direct flows of capital derived from oil. The project asks three core questions: How do oil infrastructures produce and shape national space? How do infrastructures redistribute agency and imbue political projects with momentum? And how do infrastructures serve as contested sites of capital accumulation? Building on recent contributions to Science and Technology Studies, this project attempts to answer these questions using a diverse array of archival resources to examine six oil infrastructure projects. The researcher plans to publish the results of this project as peer-reviewed articles, and he will use his dissertation as the initial draft of a book monograph for academics, policymakers, and members of the general public. He also plans to use these results to reach out to policy audiences at conferences and in peer-reviewed policy venues. This research on oil infrastructures promises to make novel contributions to three distinct subfields of Science and Technology Studies: History of Technology, Environmental History, and Infrastructure Studies. It shifts from a conventional focus on commodity production and consumption within environmental history and studies of extractive industries toward an analysis of the flows of energy, commodities, and capital that tie together the oil industry. It intentionally brings material and capital flows into the same analytical frame in order to provide a more complete account of the socio-technical networks that historically constituted the oil industry, and to better understand the materiality of struggles over the distribution of oil wealth. As decarbonization advances worldwide, spaces built around infrastructures designed to transport and refine oil, facilitate petroleum-powered trade, and absorb or direct flows of oil wealth will need to confront the momentum and path dependency that such infrastructures have produced, as well as looming prospects of infrastructural abandonment and capital flight. This research will aid citizens and policymakers in making historically informed decisions about energy policy. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.