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Authors join peers, scholars, and friends in conversation. Topics include environment, humanities, race, social justice, cultural studies, art, literature and literary criticism, media studies, sociology, anthropology, grief and loss, mental health, and more.
We're imposing an understanding of the archive as a resource, that can be extracted from.
Jordan B. Kinder:And one of the things that I find interesting and powerful about the groups that I'm critiquing is how they garner sympathy for an industry rather than the workers themselves.
Thomas Pringle:We're getting, you know, the better part of a century of liberal environmentalism. I would just love to hear what this post environmental turn means for both of you and your interventions here. Hello, everyone, and welcome to our, conversation here where we have two guests here to speak about their brand new book projects, very exciting research, and brilliant new monographs on University of Minnesota Press. First, I'd like to introduce Lisa Yin Hahn, who's soon to be an assistant professor of media studies at Pitzer College. Her research is situated at the intersections of environmental media studies, media infrastructure studies, and science and technology studies.
Thomas Pringle:Her book project Deepwater Alchemy, Extractive Mediation and the Taming of the Seafloor examines how media operations in deep ocean environments pave the way for extractive industry. With Lisa, we also have Jordan Kinder, who is assistant professor in the Department of Communication Studies at Wilfrid Laurier University, where he studies and teaches on the cultural politics of energy, media, infrastructure, and environment. He previously held postdoctoral fellowships at McGill and Harvard. His book project Refining Canadian Oil through Social Media is a critical examination of the emergence of the Canadian pro oil movement on social media primarily through the 2010s. I'm Thomas Pringle, an assistant professor of cinema and media studies at the University of Southern California with Gertrude Koch and Bernard Stiegler.
Thomas Pringle:I'm the co author of Machine, which was also a University of Minnesota Press, published in 2019. Just to get things started, I wanted to ask both of you and, I mean, I just wanna emphasize how brilliant these books are, how much I've learned from both of them. I've been reading both of your works for quite some time, so it was really just totally thrilling for me to be able to see the entirety of the argument. And also, I'm just excited to hear what you both have to say about some commonalities and threads that really speak to one another across both projects. So I thought that maybe where we could start is with the concept of extraction.
Thomas Pringle:And, you know, something that I think is really interesting about both books is that you're coming with a relationship to media studies in particular from commitments to the environmental humanities and the blue humanities. You know, extraction is a kind of central concept here and something that I often end up thinking about with environmental humanities topics. I always come back to this book Nature's Metropolis by William Cronin, where he thinks a lot about commodities like wheat and everything that needs to be in place from railroads to stock markets to certain kinds of cultural productions in Chicago that, you know, are necessary for us to think about a natural entity as becoming valuable, as having a kind of commodity value. It's it's more than labor, right? It has these cultural connotations.
Thomas Pringle:And for me, as I was reading through both of your work, you know, you are thinking about extraction as a particular way of talking about media studies as being something that maybe brings value or valorization to the environment or the natural world. So maybe just as a provocation, I'd love to hear both of you, you know, start thinking and talking about extraction resources. You know, Jordan, I'm thinking specifically about how extractive capital binds these mutual and mutually informing digital platforms and fossil economies in Alberta. And, Lisa, you know, you lead with this really strong definition of extraction as being a relation of non reciprocity, that you're looking at all these visual technologies that access the depths of the seafloor to sort of extend the operations of capital, you know, but not strictly representational. Also these non representational forces, Right?
Thomas Pringle:Infrastructure and nonhuman entities. So, I mean, it just seems like such a rich terrain to sort of think how is extraction working for you? How do your books, you know, mutual intervention sort of carve out space for that concept in media studies?
Lisa Yin Han:I can start. Thank you so much for, for that introduction, Thomas. I think, you know, you're absolutely right to to start with that question as one of the, you know, big places where our books intersect, thinking about extraction and mediation together. My book is all about the construction of the the deep sea and sea floor as an extractive frontier. And and I say in the book, not all mediations are extractive, but extractions all entail some form of of mediation.
Lisa Yin Han:And so, you know, I'm thinking about extraction very broadly in the book as this process of taking without giving back. And it was a way for me to think about acts of mediation as extensions of extractive pipelines in the ocean like that. Before we build the pipeline, right, we're building the fiber optic cable that allows us to monitor the site as an extractive site. And then I think beyond the institutional collisions between communications and and resource extraction, I was also thinking a lot about the materiality of mediation itself. Like, what does it mean to think about the production of ocean media beyond just the pro filmic space of of what's in front of the camera, but also, you know, about the camera itself, the apparatus itself, its physical impacts on the surrounding environment.
Lisa Yin Han:Because, you know, especially when it comes to filming underwater space or putting sensors in the ocean, you know, we're not just floating around capturing images without without impact. We're creating light pollution, sound pollution, using disposable devices that become trash, using biosides. That's really where the force of, the intervention was for me is is thinking about this very environmentally situated context for both mediation and extraction in our oceans and thinking of mediation itself as an extractive process.
Jordan B. Kinder:Yeah. My my story with extraction is a bit straightforward in some senses that then scales out to kind of reverberate theoretically in a more similar way to Lisa. I was initially sort of interested in the oil sands as a project mainly in relation to pipelines and understanding pipelines as a kind of terrain of struggle, both, in terms of cultural imaginaries and a kind of, like, material politics. From there, pipelines are transporting the oil sands themselves and usually in the form of diluted bitumen. And getting to this base process of extraction helped me kind of anchor, my attention in some senses, and that didn't really come until quite a bit later in the the project, particularly as it became more clear to me that this was a media studies project in the first place.
Jordan B. Kinder:My background is in literary studies and kind of critical and cultural theory, and it was really through this project that I became a media studies thinker. And so extraction eventually became to me the kind of anchor point to think through both a kind of metaphorical cultural politics of taking and nonreciprocity as was kind of mentioned as a key term before, but also as a kind of material connection between pipelines themselves and kind of media infrastructures as extractive enterprises understood, both in terms of that metaphorical sense, but in a very material sense. So other sort of signifiers come to mind like decontextualization and these sorts of things, and that's a kind of key pivot point that the book focuses on because it's suggesting that decontextualizing is happening at a kind of ideological and cultural level through the media projects and, media events that I study, and that these parallel the actual material extractive process that happens in oil sands production. And and thinking those two together, I think, is absolutely necessary in terms of both accounting for and understanding this kind of larger infrastructural turn. As I kind of lay out in the introduction of my book, it mostly is a kind of more ideological and discursive analysis more than anything, but it does so from this anchoring to the material.
Jordan B. Kinder:And that more recent work of mine accounts for that at a at a more highly theoretical level, whereas this book follows that but does this more historical and ideological and cultural accounting. And so, actually, all of those kind of more theoretical interventions took shape as I was revising the project and making sense of these, relationships between data centers as extractive enterprises and the pipeline itself, both understanding the pipeline as media and as an extractive infrastructure in its own and same with the data center in these senses as kind of resource intensive extractive projects. How do these relate to one another? How does the cultural and symbolic and ideological projects behind the pro oil movement that I study as it kind of mostly circulates and takes shape through social media? How does that relate at a material level to the kind of intensities that are operating at, say, the data center?
Thomas Pringle:Maybe if I could just, you know, follow-up on that really quickly, Jordan. It's interesting that you say that, you know, you come from a background in literary studies, cultural studies, critical theory, you know, into a project that became a media studies one, and, you know, in part, what's so interesting to sort of think across the chapters in your work is, you know, you start with historical context for Ezra Levante's, Ethical Oil, this book publication that gives a bit of a historical framework for what moves into a digital cultural project, which, you know, at least in my reading, follows this, as you say, decontextualization of the positive affects and feelings of what cultures find valuable about living in a resource economy. Lisa, maybe to come to your first case study driven chapter here where you establish a salvage extraction dynamic between what it is about finding archaeological projects, looking for heritage on the seafloor as discerning in these material wrecks, something valuable about strategic historical narration, right, that ends up playing into a dynamic that's, you know, in some ways technologically driven, but in other ways culturally driven, about actually turning the seafloor into something that is also not just about heritage but about resources and value.
Thomas Pringle:And so how do you talk about culture in sort of turning environments into something valuable and, you know, how do you actually narrate that across a series of case studies that aren't necessarily media as, you know, maybe classically defined as, representational or as strictly communication, I think, as as Lisa, as you really nicely point out in the intro to your book.
Lisa Yin Han:Thank you for that question. I this is a really interesting train of thought. I think for me, you know, I was very self conscious about making my book legible. And one of the things I kind of knew right off the bat that the ocean itself, you know, it's one of the most sort of mainstream ways in which it has been mediated is through this idea of, like, shipwrecks and archives, and I wanted to be able to speak to that. So it ended up being the chapter that I opened with, even though it was one of those sort of last chapters that I was really kind of digging into and thinking about and doing research about.
Lisa Yin Han:And so that first chapter in which I proposed the idea of salvage extraction, it really tries to make the case that, you know, we construct the seafloor as both an archive and a frontier. And in fact, these things are not opposed to one another, that that these are two sides of the same coin. That in a lot of ways, what's happening is that we're imposing an understanding of the archive itself and of heritage itself as a resource, that can be extracted from. One of the things I talk a little bit more about in that chapter is a way in which nautical archeological expeditions have been, like, commissioned and used strategically for political purposes, right, to justify certain, ideas of national, identity, for instance. You know, that salvage extraction dynamic carries through all of my case studies to some degree and beyond just this question of resource extraction, extraction of oil, you know, the energy resources that we're we're kind of we think of when we think of extraction, that includes cultural resources as well.
Jordan B. Kinder:Yeah. I can't help but think of the portion of my book where I cite Geo Tactic who writes about Alberta and oil politics. And one of his arguments is that this kind of more romantic understanding of nature, the flip side of that coin is the extractive one. And he does a pretty thorough and generative analysis of how that has played out within Alberta. One image in particular from my own analysis that comes to mind is the Rocky Mountains and Lake Louise, a photo that was circulated by one of the pro oil groups that I study with a woman wearing a hoodie that says, you know, I love Canadian oil, with this lush serene landscape in the background.
Jordan B. Kinder:And so I think this this is a very similar dynamic in the ways that the salvage extraction mentality, I think, and structure operates. In that, there's almost a kind of ideological separation that happens between, nature and culture in these ways that feeds into extractive enterprise and sort of lets it off the hook in some senses. Part of what I propose in my book project is to do more recontextualization of that which has been decontextualized or extract relationship and not one that can be separated, as if you can just go to Banff National Park and have a great time while the oil sands carries on and that the two can can operate in harmony.
Lisa Yin Han:And I think also, like, this question of salvage connects up to this idea of waste and how we define waste, especially now in this time when there is so much emphasis on circular economies of waste, on the resourcing of waste itself. So that's something that I'm interested as well, like how we delineate the boundaries between resource and waste. I I wanted to pose a a question to Jordan. One of the things that you talk about with you with your kind of understanding of media is is this refining of narrative. Right?
Lisa Yin Han:So you kind of discuss all sorts of case studies that include things like invocations of of strategic realism, promises that are made, you know, in the future perfect tense, dismissals of opposition. I was wondering if you could say a little bit more about, like, what is is productive to you about using that term refining as opposed to perhaps, like, you know, recycling of narrative or distorting narrative. And then as a follow-up, I've been thinking a lot about so much of what becomes sensible to us as dependent, not just on narratively refining, as you put it, ideas about oil and resource, but also refining and defining stakeholders. How do you see the audiences of petroturfing, and and in what ways do you see that audience also getting refined?
Jordan B. Kinder:Yeah. That's a great question. Refining as a kind of anchoring concept came to me a bit later in the project. What I was initially quite excited about is the way that it answers for a bit more than a term like recycling does for the actual process of extraction that I see is happening at a kind of narratological, ideological level. A term like recycling or even at times I do use mirroring, but at recycling almost suggests some sense of reciprocity with the kind of raw materials that are being recycled.
Jordan B. Kinder:And I really don't wanna kind of reify that relationship in any sense and make very clear that what I'm studying is not in any sort of sense of reciprocal with with what it's actually suggesting. It's it's sort of communities and audiences are, which you kinda see mapped onto in some senses the chapter structure, which is, you know, like a working class, two spirit LGBTQIA peoples, indigenous peoples, and the environment itself. There's no reciprocity occurring in in those relationships even though they're being presented as such. And so using a term like refining is trying to identify the ways that certain kinds of raw materials, and let's say, in this case, the raw materials are the kinds of progressive political social media interventions that it's taking the format from. Those might be the raw materials in this formulation and really kind of sharpening for them for really particular ends.
Jordan B. Kinder:In that sense, who are the stakeholders and audience? That actually changed in the time, I think, that I was following these groups and organizations. It changed from a kinda more liberal audience that would ears might perk up when you hear things like ethical oil and imagine that something like that could be possible to a much more right wing crypto fascist, if not full on fascist audience that kind of maps onto the ebbs and flows of the broader right wing social media scape with a kind of oily sheen. So that that shift of audience, I think, is part of all part of that refining process too, which is understanding that there is what I guess is sometimes called a base audience to speak to, that that's really where this work flourished in. Because the ethical oil project on the whole, Levant's version and the kind of campaign that came after it, really wasn't particularly successful.
Jordan B. Kinder:And neither really are the the groups that I study in this book yet. But by the time that the book ends, you know, in 02/2020, '2 thousand '20 '2, we see things like the Freedom Convoy and other kind of interrelated organizations and and events coming to the fore. And so there is a kind of inertia being built up that I'm trying to kind of track and identify and kinda create space for the people to actually have an entry point into to naming what I I see as the kind of, like, fossil fascist elements of this process. So the audience the shifting audience has followed that path of refinement in that way. I will not be surprised to see these types of narratives and even some of the specific groups that I study becoming more mainstream in the next five to ten years.
Jordan B. Kinder:Ezra Levant is now trying to revive the ethical oil project, so it kinda disappeared. And then some of the other groups that I study came to, you know, essentially take up the project. Now there's a a crowdfunding effort to revive ethical oil. Now that the time is right, I think, and the time that that is making it right is kind of around questions of energy security through the war instance that we're in in the present that is, creating more space for these narratives to become legitimized again.
Thomas Pringle:Maybe if I could pick up on that really quick. Lisa, I would just love to return that that question to you too and to hear you, you know, say a little bit more about your audience because I was really struck, you know, there was there was a moment in your conclusion when to sort of be thinking with Jordan's argument about refinement, decontextualization, and an argument that maybe we can talk a bit more about in a moment about recontextualization that happens regarding, you know, relations to fossil fuels towards the end of the book. Lisa, you have this moment where you're working with Leslie Green's book and you're thinking about a critique of enumeration that's a part of how the deep ocean is mediated, and I was thinking a lot about audience. Part of where you're pushing, I think, in some of your examples is really within some of these scientific practices of understanding in strategic ways, again, to come back to that idea of strategic realism, constructing what's happening underneath the deep ocean, making it visible, making it instrumental in ways that are obfuscating and and neglectful to questions like ethical relationships to to nonhumans and ecological health.
Lisa Yin Han:Yeah. Great question. First, I think all of us are ocean stakeholders. Right? It's a very broad audience in terms of who I think this matters to.
Lisa Yin Han:But in that conclusion in particular, throughout the book, I think I am self consciously speaking to some centers of power, in oceanography, in ocean science in particular. A lot of the folks that I spoke to in getting a lot of this information, you know, I'm interested in engaging with the dialogue with. One of the things that I noticed when I was doing research for this, you know, which involved going to oceanographic spaces a lot of the time, talking to people, and listening to talks. There's a sense of awareness, I think, about the need to expand audiences to say that we need to incorporate more indigenous knowledge into ocean observation. We need humanists.
Lisa Yin Han:Right? Like, we need people who understand communities to also be involved in this conversation. There's a lot of self awareness of that, but at the same time, so much of that gets atomized out. I think there's a way in which because so much of this project is about scaling up and about creating, like, a global coalition of ocean observers, that decontextualization does happen. You end up seeing a lot more tokenism than genuine co productions of knowledge.
Lisa Yin Han:You end up seeing a lot of calls for integration that are effectively calls for assimilation, right, into existing knowledge systems as opposed to, like, you know, maybe more genuine engagements, good faith engagements with other knowledge cultures and epistemologies. A big part of this book, even though I am, you know, mostly speaking to those centers of power, is to broaden that audience, that sense of audience. Right? To include, you know, not just Western Ocean observers, not just questions of diversity and identity as we imagine it in the kind of normative sphere, but also to include the nonhuman as well as as a as a potential audience of the book or a stakeholder.
Jordan B. Kinder:One of the things that interests me about your project is the way that it is, like, your own views are integrated into this larger practice that you're analyzing and building an account of. How did you navigate those, relationships through your interviews and that kind of more, let's call it ethnographic research, going to conferences and that sort of thing? My book is very much peering out into a phenomenon that I would rather not participate in one way or the other insofar as I can separate myself from it, having a kind of deep knowledge of these extractive economies and how they operate. But in in your case, you're you're right in there, and your answer to the question before suggests that one of the goals is to kind of influence the kind of subjects that you are studying.
Lisa Yin Han:Both of you know, like, being in media studies. Media studies is very slippery as a field. It's not super legible, I think, outside of our academic center. So initially, you know, I encountered a lot of assumptions that I was in these spaces to be a science communicator, right, to essentially, like, translate the work that is being done in science. And I think that's honestly pretty internalized by people in STEM.
Lisa Yin Han:Like, the idea that the humanities is, like, just a, like, a tasty woke sauce that you can put onto an existing scaffolding, you know, empirical scaffolding for research. When, of course, that's not an accurate perspective on what critical media studies is. So I definitely was wary of that. I think when I had to step into these spaces, workshops and conferences, I initially tried to avoid the language of media to some degree, you know, to say, like, you know, I'm a I'm a cultural historian of ocean observation. I'm I'm someone who's interested in histories of underwater sensing technology, you know, someone who's exploring ties between science and, like, cultural imaginaries of the sea, which all are statements that I think are accurate.
Lisa Yin Han:I think also for me, it was important to communicate my respect for the researchers that I was interacting with, like that was really central. Yes, I'm engaging in criticism. Yes, I'm maybe critical of of institutions at large, but I'm not here to take people down or assume the worst, particularly the people who are generous enough to talk to me. Right? So I'm not here to take you down.
Lisa Yin Han:I'm here to learn from you and learn more about your perspective. For the most part, I found people very willing to engage with me. Most of the the scientists, the sociographers I talked to seemed to already grasp the importance of what I was doing. The folks that I interviewed, a lot of them were pretty well versed in science communication themselves. Like, they were eager to tell me, you know, not only about, like, the problems that the ocean is facing, but problems that they were facing as researchers.
Lisa Yin Han:So I found myself asking a lot of questions about their positionality. Right? Like, what's your your relationship to environmentalism? What's your relationship to extractive industry without judgment? And then also being really attentive to the choices that were made around translation.
Lisa Yin Han:What do you think more people should know about or understand? You know, where is the energy in terms of research drivers? A lot of them without without my prompting even chose to use media metaphors to explain tricky scientific concepts to me, which I found especially interesting. You know, I'm obviously critical of extractivism, but I maintain that, like, there are no heroes and villains really in my book. It's not so much about pigeonholing people in one regard, but but rather thinking about the systems as a whole.
Lisa Yin Han:Yeah.
Jordan B. Kinder:I think that's an important point that has some resonance and some frictions in between our projects, I think, which is the role of critique and who the target of critique might be. Something that I found interesting throughout the presentation of my research as it was developing was misunderstanding of the targets of my critique to be, like, the actual people who work in the oil sands, which was not and never has been the case. And in fact, I think that that, let's call it an assumption or or tendency to imagine that, already does the kind of reifying work of the groups and organizations that I'm especially saying are not representative of a working class in kind of any capacity. And that in their own ways, they're actually exploiting that class for their own. And very similarly to the industry itself, that has never been, super clear without having to say it that clearly in in the book.
Jordan B. Kinder:I made sure to signpost that, but it was clearly a point of friction that I think spoke to larger anxieties around critique and of pigeonholing and these sorts of things, which I think, in some cases, pigeonholing is necessary. And I do that a bit in my book strategically, and I hope it makes sense and works out. But I think you can see more sympathies coming through for working class, for scientific researchers, particularly in the chapter on environmental imaginaries. Those are kind of tricky positions to be in. And one of the things that I find kind of interesting and powerful about the groups that I'm critiquing is how they kind of abstract that larger garnering sympathy for an industry rather than the workers themselves and sort of creating conditions for workers to have the sympathy towards their own industry, which is an interesting state of affairs and very kind of, like, anti labor in general.
Thomas Pringle:Can I ask a method question that I think follows from this question of critique as well, like, moves across both projects? Because these are both interdisciplinary projects. On the one hand, you know, Lisa, we see archival research, we see a lot of historical context for, you know, technological development, scientific development. We also see ethnographic interviews, and we see a lot of STS methods coming in to form a theoretical framework, but also, you know, drawing work from critical race theory. And so, like, a style of criticism that's coming in and giving us sort of theoretical narration to a lot of the history.
Thomas Pringle:I'd love to know more about the synthesis and what that brings to a slippery field like media studies. On the other side, Jordan, I also see, you know, your kind of engagement with media studies on this topic of critique being a very interesting one where, for instance, where some might approach studying digital cultures from digital humanities, tools based approach where you're scraping data, you're using APIs to get a view, and there's, like, a moment where you talk about a little bit of the work that you did with that. There was another moment when you got to, I think it was, you know, the British Columbians for Prosperity, their, YouTube page, and you noted that it had been taken down, that you were no longer able to access these videos, and it really, like, highlighted for me a kind of method commitment for you where studying digital cultures isn't just about talking about users, but you instead locate some of your ideological critique in relationships between form and content, which gives a kind of depth to analysis of these particular images that brings it back to media studies in a in an interesting way that's not necessarily, you know, what we might see in a digital humanities project, for instance.
Thomas Pringle:But both across the board, I'd I'd just love to hear more about interdisciplinary methods and how that plays into the critiques that you're offering.
Jordan B. Kinder:I could probably answer quickly and so maybe I'll go first. For me, I'm I'm realizing as a researcher that I'm guided by the objects of study and what that necessitates from me as a researcher. Not to say that I'm sort of passively moving around and not making decisions, but the project necessitated doing a certain kind of level of archiving, I should say. And that's where the sort of more digital humanities methods kind of came into play, but it never would have made sense as a big data project if people are really even doing those still anymore, or can they, I guess, is the other question. That's kind of a footnote that I made, which is the point in drawing attention to the lack of API access on Twitter, now x, and these sorts of things.
Jordan B. Kinder:I thankfully did most of my research and writing before any of those changes happened, and maybe I won't be a social media scholar anymore. This is all to say that I had a very kind of clear idea of being guided by the media themselves. How do I answer questions that I have that are maybe more on the kind of critical theory side of things or motivated by that aim of media objects that actually accounts for their media specificity in some ways? And for that, that required archiving videos off of YouTube and boring processes of just kind of making sure that these objects were persistent in some way beyond what the owners of the objects could necessitate. Because in some ways, the book itself is gonna be a bit of a time capsule.
Jordan B. Kinder:I'm I'm probably not gonna be studying this stuff anymore. It was not the most fun stuff to study for, like, ten years, and other people are doing it now. But you don't really get a full picture of of how this emerged without actually having seen it happen in real time and doing some of that archiving practices. In terms of this kind of interdisciplinary method, it's really, how do I do justice to the object and subjects, but the objects themselves through their sort of media specificity. And that attention, I guess, to form and content that you've pointed out that kind of runs through the whole work that I think squares my more, like, literary background with the media studies one in a way that makes the two very, legible together.
Lisa Yin Han:Great answer. I'm gonna echo Jordan on this one in saying that, yeah, I think I was motivated by just, like, wanting to do due diligence for my objects, and these different methodologies had different affordances. Right? Like, I think a lot of my discovery took place in the archive, like getting into the nitty gritty of grant proposals, how developers of technology were thinking about the possible uses of that technology. I really felt like the extraction part came through maybe strongest in the archival materials that I was working with.
Lisa Yin Han:Like, people really were thinking about this the whole time. The interviews and stuff, a lot of that was a little bit more introductory, like, kind of getting a basic lay of the land. Yeah. And then as a media scholar, you know, I I I definitely looked at media text, conducted textual analysis and discourse analysis and all these things. For me, I think all of those methods, you know, ended up being necessary.
Lisa Yin Han:They gave a sense of depth to the project. I think they were important in making sure that I was speaking to the relevant researchers. I was just sort of, like, talking off the cuff about all of this, right, that I had specific case studies, specific uses of rhetoric that I was referencing throughout. I was wondering if we could maybe turn our conversation a little bit to the role of nonhumans in our our books. So, Jordan, you know, in one of your chapters, you talk a little bit about glycine and, you know, the use of animals in some of these greenwashing initiatives or or these these sort of, like, reclamation, specifically oil sands reclamation projects.
Lisa Yin Han:And, yeah, I was wondering if if you could talk a little bit more about what your relationship was to thinking about nonhuman life and ethics and the way that these figures get mobilized in the petroturfing project.
Jordan B. Kinder:Yeah. The case of oil sands reclamation, which is really kind of one of the larger focal points of that chapter, even though it's kinda more like environmental technologies, but, reclamation plays a kind of overdetermined role in that within the oil sands. As a side point, I should say that reclamation is what happens after an extractive project, like in the oil sands, has reached the kind of end of its life, and it's a contractually obligated step that kind of returns the land in some capacity back to its former ecological and even in some senses kind of cultural role. In the case of the oil sands, it's been a pretty fraught project in the sense that they've never really quite figured out how to do it. And so there's only one example that's gone through this whole process, and it's a very small percentage without messing up my numbers.
Jordan B. Kinder:I think it's point 1% of affected land. And that might be even less now because I think the affected land has increased, in the time of that statistic versus this single project. The bison themselves play a very important symbolic role in proving that this can be done, basically. If the bison are living, the reclamation is successful. And it also operates as a kind of mediator between indigenous land based practices and the extractive practices of industry as a kind of way of absolving industry from its settler colonial impetus.
Jordan B. Kinder:The bison that exist are being managed in a co agreement between, I think, Syncrude and Fort McKay First Nation. What's interesting to me is to see how this figure becomes kind of barometer for the success of a project like this and how the animal, in that sense, kind of does a particular kind of almost cultural labor of operating as a promotional device in some senses, which kind of leads me to one of the questions that I had that I think is depending on the circles that you ask it in more controversial than not. In animal studies circles, not that controversial. In Marxist circles, more controversial, I think, is the question about the relationship between animals and labor, and do animals do labor. Your focus on whales throughout the book, particularly in their relationship to, like, sensing technologies, reveals a way that humans and nonhuman animals have a kind of laboring relationship in that way that suggests that there is maybe a surplus value being produced by a whale in its data collection in that sense?
Jordan B. Kinder:That's a kind of open question that I'm wondering if we can think about a bit.
Lisa Yin Han:Yeah. Well, first of all, I wanna hear more about, like, your perspective on the critique and and where you see the controversy, but there's a couple things going on in my mind. On the one hand, certain animals are given our sympathy because they're they're charismatic. They're easily recruited into these sorts of greenwashing narratives. I I see some shared impotices in the use of, like, bison and whales as tokens, right, and and references to maybe, like, pinkwashing or rainbowwashing, other kinds of washings that feed into the the greenwashing aspect where you take perfect victims, or or as one of my student puts it, you know, like poster children of environmentalism to act as as liberal signifiers within projects of dispossession and extraction.
Lisa Yin Han:But beyond this, I talk about whales in a lot of senses. I'm thinking of a chapter that I discussed specifically, marine mammal telemetry and the use of whales as as media infrastructure. You know, it's literally us capitalizing on the physical movements and sensoriums of marine organisms and using them as tools. I invoked labor because I was sort of thinking about labor in the same way that we understand. For instance, the the social media user, the prod user, right, to steal the the media studies term, as engaging in a form of passive value generation through their data, right, through content production that is not necessarily on their you know, monetized on their behalf.
Lisa Yin Han:I think more recently, like, I have seen explicit projections of of human social formations onto aquatic animals. So, like, military and civilian research that, you know, explicitly uses that language of these are fish employees, you know, or, like, these are, like, shrimp soldiers. And even plankton, right, like, is is, like, not immune to that socialization. That framework of labor for me, you know, maybe it comes less so from that Marxist place than it is, like, directly importing language from the top down and thinking about that projection of social relationships that we have in the human world onto animals. I'm curious what you think about that and where you see it potentially the the controversy.
Jordan B. Kinder:I don't hold the like, I'm all for saying that animals can labor. I just know that in some places, that doesn't vibe. But I will say may maybe adding to that, I think, yeah, the question of passive value generation. Is this that passive? Are whales being used simply as tools?
Jordan B. Kinder:Are the bison being used simply as tools? Where is the agency and so on and so forth? And and is agency absolutely necessary in defining these categories?
Thomas Pringle:Maybe I could just direct us to, you know, one brilliant and concise line, Lisa, that, you know, has stayed with me since I since I read it in the telemetry chapter. You write, today, what we're dealing with is not just a sick ocean or a new frontier to be conquered, but the prospect of a permanently intubated patient, as a kind of description of, you know, nonhuman life put to work in you know, as an intubated patient. That figuration is is very vivid, and I would just love to hear more about that and what this maybe means from both of you in relationship to these kinds of configurations of, nonhuman labor and, you know, how these kinds of washings, how that turns on what we're reflecting on. We're getting, you know, the better part of a century of liberal environmentalism that we're kind of looking back on and and maybe what this post environmental turn means for both of you and your your interventions here.
Lisa Yin Han:To just kind of provide some context on that, one of the big things I noticed was the use of medical language to describe our oceans, right, like as the lungs of the planet as being sick and, you know, so this metaphor of, like, permanent intubation was useful for me in in terms of bringing that out that perspective within ocean science, of of thinking of marine scientists as doctors. But then at the same time, thinking about what the impact of all this infrastructuralization of the deep sea is doing. Right? Like, because we imagine or we have as our goal the construction of permanent infrastructures at the seafloor, you know, permanent presence. And to have permanent presence means also that there's this whole host of narratives that come forth to justify that presence, even if that presence is damaging on the environment, and to justify the use of certain tools, the continued investment in the development of certain kinds of tools.
Lisa Yin Han:There's a great book that came out by Adam Fish on on the use of ocean drones and the way that that has been narrativized as essential, right, to environmental efforts. Like, Fish, I'm very skeptical of all that that, like, the need for, like, a high-tech infrastructure in order to do anything environmentally friendly in our oceans or in order to heal our oceans. Like, we need to, like, use, all of these tools. So I thought that was just, like, a helpful image in in both invoking, like, the plans to expand ocean media infrastructure and also embedding my own critique of that. We're not thinking of a return to health per se.
Lisa Yin Han:We're thinking of permanent intubation.
Jordan B. Kinder:Yeah. I don't think I have too much to add directly to that other than that it makes me think about providing an accounting of kind of, like, where we're at in environmentally maybe in terms of the oil sands project. Where we're at is making a kind of, like, net zero oil sands industry. I don't know what that says about the successes or failures of liberal environmentalism, but the kind of agenda and where a lot of funding is going into is into, research that's making at the kind of point of production there would be less emissions. Mainly, I suspect because downstream emissions at the kind of point of consumption don't count for the region that actually produces it in the kind of general carbon accounting.
Jordan B. Kinder:And so a kind of net zero oil sands is the future or the the hope for the future in that industry.
Lisa Yin Han:I just wanted to kinda ask a a quick follow-up. So, you know, one of the areas that our books really converge on is this idea of post environmentalism, this idea that knowledge making, especially environmental Western environmental science, is interlaced with extractivism. You used the term economy mentality in the intro, which I thought was really helpful to think about that centering of economy behind all of this. I definitely struggled with exiting that logic, you know, because it is so entrenched particularly in our in our oceans. And I wanted to ask, this kind of goes back to the the conversation we started to have earlier, what grounds are there for staging this discursive struggle from the inside and, you know, in your own engagements as as a scholar and activist?
Lisa Yin Han:Like, what is your relationship to disruption and disrupting that logic of econometality?
Jordan B. Kinder:Yeah. I mean, I like blockades and indigenous reoccupation projects. But I I will say, I mean, where the book ends is kind of suggesting that we maybe exit out of the more discursive and ideological struggle that something like the PetroTurfing project tries to kind of wedge into or make the kind of end in itself, which really kind of boxes in the possibilities for what imagining or even building futures beyond a kind of oil economy might look like. And so my gentle conclusion is to say to not participate in that and find find alternative ways of relating to to oil, to environment, to the nonhuman world, and to the human world in that way too, saying, yeah, blockades and reoccupation projects are great. They're great because they're not simply just blockading fossil fuel infrastructure, but actually building alternatives and and giving us glimpses of what these futures could look like, I think, in really powerful ways.
Jordan B. Kinder:But, unfortunately, I think the contemporary media environment we find ourselves in makes it very difficult to kind of name those as potential futures to aspire towards or transition points in that we're stuck proving claims wrong from nefarious organ groups and organizations that misrepresent their own backgrounds and commitments. My sort of prognosis is to just not participate in that.
Thomas Pringle:Lisa, I would just love to to hear you also, you know, reflect on positionality as research activist because, Jordan, I was fascinated in the conclusion with precisely this exit that you mentioned, right, where there's a part where you talk about oil and other fossil fuels, in other words, are here to stay and then, you know, you continue and you say curating alternative relations to fossil fuels rather than the immobilizing option presented by a purity politics of fossil fuel abolitionism. Fascinating statement and, you know, that points us towards a question, I think, about ethics that, Lisa, you develop and you define in in language of relations and the nonhuman and the conclusion to your book as well. And so I would just love to hear more about relations and and ethics as concluding moments in in both of your projects.
Lisa Yin Han:Yeah. One of the things that I mentioned, in my conversation about ethics is this idea of offshore humanism. Jordan, I think you and I did some thinking about this at at, the Columbia Environmental Institute. But this this this notion that, like, it's not so much just about a turning away from humans and humanism, but about forming solidarity through an understanding of, like, shared vulnerability. Leaning into questions of multi species justice, and also solidarity is really important.
Lisa Yin Han:Initially, I I was leaning into frameworks for for multi species justice. I think as the years went on, I started to think a little bit more about animal studies specifically and its relationships to trauma studies. Yeah. I think this generation, we see a lot of the enactment of of that, like, intersectional solidarity and multi species solidarity that I find really meaningful and inspiring.
Jordan B. Kinder:I can't help but use this as an opportunity to bring up orcas sabotaging yachts, speaking of interspecies solidarity.
Lisa Yin Han:So I love that story. You know, I do think it says more about us in our current political imagination than it does anything about orcas themselves. The fact that we imagine orcas as like taking revenge and sinking the rich. Right? Like, I think that is definitely tied to what we've seen in Hollywood blockbusters recently about, like, oceans taking revenge.
Lisa Yin Han:I think it's tied to the whole Titan submersible thing and this idea of sinking the rich. You know? There's an element of self projection to all of that, but at the same time, I don't think it's necessarily a bad thing to imagine animal uprisings. Whales exhibit a lot of solidarity behavior among themselves that that transcends the sort of, like, survival of the fittest paradigm that we impose onto them. They also exhibit behaviors that transcend our own projections of, like, ourselves and humans onto whales.
Lisa Yin Han:I don't know. I I don't have too much more to say on that. There's a great book called Animal Revolution, though, by Ron Berlio that kind of runs with this narrative of animal resistance and also makes the case that this is always gonna be beyond us, beyond our our comprehension.
Jordan B. Kinder:I do find the drive to understand the behavior seems to be distributed beyond just the researchers who study this stuff themselves, also fascinating. So while we may be projecting ourselves into it, hoping that we could be the ones sinking the yachts, It's also interesting to see this desire to try to comprehend the behavior and then the follow-up sort of media articles saying they're just having fun. It's like just a social behavior of them having fun. And I guess I'm wondering if that's just the answer. That that sounds great.
Jordan B. Kinder:I suppose it also links to where I end the book too, which is with, like, mostly a citation of Zoe Todd who talks about fossil fuels not really being the fundamental issue but rather what we do with them and how they've been weaponized. I think one of the questions that often gets asked to me and to others who are kind of advocating for post oil futures is how do we have syringes and how do we have medical technologies without plastics and these sorts of things. Answering that question is already so far beyond even trying to think about what we might do differently. Right? Sure.
Jordan B. Kinder:We can still have plastic syringes. That's totally possible at a certain scale without doing what we're doing right now. We don't need the oil sands for that. There's a reason they're called unconventional. There's a reason so many resources go into producing them.
Jordan B. Kinder:We don't we don't really need that for an actual kind of more human centered even version of relating to fossil fuels.
Lisa Yin Han:I'm wondering if maybe we can transition to thinking more broadly about where our interest is in in in the future as well as our positionality within academia a little bit. Being interested in extractivism, both of us might be thinking a little bit about the role of extraction in our research itself and whether that reflects back on us. And so I'm I'm curious if we could have a conversation about that, but also thinking about questions that have emerged from these projects that you're interested in exploring further.
Jordan B. Kinder:Yeah. I think there there's a moment in your in your book where you do mention about research being kind of extractive, even your own research, not just the research of the scientists that you're studying and and that this is potentially not necessarily even really a temptation, but almost like a structural necessity in some ways, and how do we even grapple with that. And it's something that I've definitely been thinking about pretty deeply in in relation to future work because I'm moving away from this weird fossil fascist pro oil movement stuff. I'm actually moving to a historical project about a pipeline that was never built, proposed in the nineteen seventies, and I'm specifically studying an architecture firm that was working for the oil and gas consortium behind one of the proposals. Part of that project is, how do I do research non extractively that accounts for all the kind of fields that I'm entering into with doing due diligence to those fields and also to doing due diligence to the peoples who are the kind of motive force behind making the pipeline not happen, which are the indigenous peoples of the Northwest Territories and Yukon, in particular, the Inuit, the Dene, and Metis.
Jordan B. Kinder:I'm very careful to make sure that this project doesn't become appropriation of particular modes of indigenous thought, and ontologization of indigenous thought that is then just leveraged to kind of critique the extractivist project, but to think about how I might not do that move because that is a very extractive move that I think we're kind of at a reckoning point within academia. And maybe we have been for a while, but it's certainly, very pronounced to me that we need to be very conscious of whose knowledge we tap into and how and to what end. And in some cases, this is more obvious than others, but it I think it's a extremely important question to be meditating on in a methodological way, not just in terms of content.
Lisa Yin Han:Totally. I I agree. I I love the sound of the new project. I think it's it's cool to think about, like, these aborted futures as opposed to just the constant kind of pressure to think about the future that we get fed within academia. I definitely have thought a lot about my own kind of methodologies being extractive in some senses, you know, going to spaces, talking to people, taking knowledge, right, and what it means to be able to return to those spaces, right, to to form long term relationships with folks rather than just kind of, like, having one off projects.
Lisa Yin Han:I've done a lot of thinking, I think, with groups of other people in in fields ranging from, like, media studies to justice studies to religious studies about extractivism in the humanities and on a larger level. There's there's no question that academia is extractive, that, you know, especially on on something like the tenure track, there's so much pressure to produce and perform mastery, and it understandably incentivizes people to engage in, like, intellectual prospecting. I think a lot of us, though, are weary of that. Increasingly, I'm seeing a lot of collective writing, collective thinking, you know, innovative approaches to publication publication that really disrupt that model. And that includes some of your own writing, by the way.
Lisa Yin Han:Shout out to After Oil Collective. And in terms of, future work, I think the book definitely left a lot of open questions that I'm I'm hoping to explore further around water and wasting and waste management in particular. I've been thinking a lot about that. I've been thinking also about emergent relationships around AI and sustainability. Again, like, in our oceans in particular, we've seen so much development in AI assisted technology, which is know, justified as environmentalist.
Lisa Yin Han:And I I'm just sort of reading more about that. I feel like I'm I'm nascent to the field of, like, AI studies.
Thomas Pringle:I just say that, you know, I also flagged that the same moment in your your introduction where you sort of speak reflexively about academic research and its relationship as incentivizing an extractive style of reading and research production. And, you know, one of the terms that, you know, both stood out to me in your definition of extraction was non reciprocity, but then also, you know, what's very clear in both of your work is you're thinking about reciprocity at the level of method, readership. It's another term that that comes up, and so I would love to hear if you have any closing comments about reciprocity and method. I thought that that was a a really nice moment in your intro, Lisa.
Jordan B. Kinder:This question of reciprocity in terms of method is a central avenue for my new project. And whether or not that's demanded by the project itself or it's coming out of my own interests or concerns or commitments, it's hard to say. I think it's probably a little bit of both. But at a very practical level, one of the routes that I'm pursuing is what can some of the archival research that I'm doing do to actually inform contemporary land based struggles in the North. And so, for instance, one of the archives that I've been looking at related to the actual architecture firm that I'm studying, it's a private archive, and it has memos and kind of internal correspondence with this oil and gas consortium.
Jordan B. Kinder:One of the kind of reciprocal elements I see this research actually performing is even just making a certain kind of research and archive available that likely doesn't exist in any other capacity outside of maybe one of the 27 oil and gas companies that were part of this consortium, if they've even bothered to keep that at all. It's kind of like realizing that the work that we're doing on our own is one component, and there's a kind of, like, larger political community based, potentiality behind what we do that may not always be grandiose or even immediately obvious. Something very subtle like that might already be enough to start to get that kind of reciprocal relationship, operating. And I do think reciprocity in that sense then rests upon a kind of giving back or at least recognizing where that space could be made from the start rather than as a kind of output.
Lisa Yin Han:That's well said. I'm definitely gonna credit Jordan with influencing some of my thinking about reciprocity and non reciprocity. In addition to that, one of the things I've been thinking a lot about is, like, the need for diplomacy and, you know, what that means in in these specific contexts that I'm working with to construct the figure of the diplomat as someone I I you know, there's there's a couple folks who talk about diplomacy, in a more theoretical sense. I think Isabelle Stengers is one of them. But this idea of needing to reconcile to also be okay with not, like, achieving the totality of a goal.
Lisa Yin Han:Right? Like, the diplomat is always, like, the betrayer in a sense a little bit in the sense of of having to navigate multiple needs from different stakeholders. Now more than ever, there's a need to think through that a little bit more and and what that means in terms of, like, translating knowledge across different sectors and fields.
Thomas Pringle:Well, reciprocity and diplomacy, I love that. I'm gonna I'm gonna read more, and I just wanna say thank you so much to both, Lisa and Jordan. I've I've learned an immense amount from, reading these monographs, and I'm very excited for all of the engagement and intervention in these fields and to continuing these conversations. I just want to say, you know, personally, I didn't get to talk about this, but, yeah, Jordan, having grown up in Alberta myself, I lived there for twenty four years, it was really impactful to me to read about the kind of decontextualization and recontextualization of petro capitalism from a place where our monuments are oil wells. It's, you know, definitely, it's been a a long part of my history too.
Thomas Pringle:So thank you both for, really wonderful work. It's gonna be mass you know, hugely helpful and important for me and and many, many, many people. So I'm just thrilled for the chance to have this conversation.
Lisa Yin Han:Thank you, Thomas, for being our interlocutor. I couldn't have imagined a better person to stage this conversation between the two of us. And, Jordan, your book is just incredible. I can't wait to teach it. Super, super exciting.
Jordan B. Kinder:I think we have to talk about the Edmonton Oilers now too, don't we? It's an obligation. We we've done orcas sabotaging yachts, and now we need to talk about the Edmonton Oilers.
Thomas Pringle:I wasn't gonna bring it up, but maybe maybe for another time.
Narrator:This has been a University of Minnesota press production. The books Deep Extractive Mediation and the Taming of the Seafloor by Lisa Yin Hahn and PetroTurfing: Refining Canadian Oil through Social Media by Jordan Kinder are available from University of Minnesota Press. Thank you for listening.