Mining Conversations. The Futurepasts of ... Shale Oil and Gas

Mining Conversations invites you to join its online session The Futurepasts of … shale oil and gas. The monthly online series critically reflects and discusses extraction and energy landscapes, across geographies and temporalities—up to this moment in which resource regimes more than ever shape economic, societal and environmental realities planetarily and locally in very unequal ways.

About the speakers

The session will host the following speakers:

Silas Grant (he/they) is Visiting Assistant Professor of American Studies at the University of New Mexico. His research focuses on the politics of environmental knowledge, legal and administrative violence, and energy futures in the Southwestern United States. Their book project, Patchwork: Land, Law, and Extraction in Greater Chaco, examines oil and gas extraction, settler land management, and Diné resistance to colonial infrastructures in the Greater Chaco Landscape of northwestern New Mexico. His current research focuses on the politics of “decarbonization” in New Mexico, paying particular attention to the colonial, racial, and gendered assumptions built into to new (and old) technologies, as well as anti-capitalist and anti-colonial organizing to advance a just energy transition. Grant completed a PhD in anthropology at the University of Chicago and held postdoctoral fellowships at Dalhousie University and the University of California, Irvine.

Monika Halkort is an assistant professor and head of the School for Transformation at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna, Austria. Her research focuses on the political and moral ecology of transformation in the context of changing geopolitical borders, which she examines through the material entanglement of techno-scientific infrastructures and metabolic flows. In her current work she looks at the legacy of oil shale production in Estonia, and unpacks how the mining of energy waste recalibrates relations of energy, labour and value as the transformative capacities of chemical residue is brought into the fold of economic activity.

Earlier writings appeared in peer-reviewed academic journals such as the International Journal for Communication, the Canadian Journal of Communication, and Tecnoscienza as well as edited books, including Mapping Crisis: Participation, Datafication and Humanitarianism in the Age of Digital.

Jackson Tamunosaki Jack is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Groningen, on the European Research Council - funded project ‘Afrextract: Environmental Histories of Resource Extraction in Africa’ (grant no. 101039920). He is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Federal University Otuoke, Nigeria. He is a member of the European Association of Social Anthropologists (EASA), the Petrocultures Research Group (a global network of researchers working on the social and cultural implications of oil and energy extraction) and the Conflict Research Network (CORN) West Africa. He was a  recipient of the African Guest Researcher Fellowship (2023) at the Nordic African Institute, Sweden. His  research examines the political ecology of resource extraction in Africa, with specific reference to the toxic legacies of crude oil drilling in Nigeria’s Niger Delta. He utilizes a combination of both ethnographic and archival approaches in exploring the extractive lifeworlds in localities of crude oil drilling while foregrounding the myriad ways impacted communities interact with, live with and respond to crude oil pollution and gas flaring.

The session will be introduced and moderated by:

Benjamin Steininger is a cultural theorist, a historian of science and technology, and a curator. 

He is affiliated as a postdoc at the Cluster of Excellence “Unifying Systems of Catalysis” (UniSysCat), TU Berlin, and at the MPI of Geoanthropology, Jena. 

He finished his master studies at HU-Berlin with a book on the technological history of the German Reichsautobahn, he wrote a dissertation at the University of Vienna on the 'Catalyst as a key principle of the 20th Century'. His main research topics are the role of catalysis chemistry and fossil resources in modernity and Anthropocene and the transformation of chemistry (#Chemiewende).

From 2012 to 2016, Benjamin Steininger headed a collaborative research project on the history of the Austrian oil industry (rohstoff-geschichte.at). Since 2012, he regularly contributed to the Anthropocene program at Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW), Berlin.In 2016, together with Alexander Klose, he founded the research collective “Beauty of Oil”. (beauty-of-oil.org). In 2017 they curated the event 'Hydrocarbons' at '1948 - unbound' at HKW Berlin, in 2020 they published 'Erdöl. Ein Atlas der Petromderne' (translations published into Russian 2021, English 2024), 2021/2022 exhibition 'Oil. Beauty and Horror in the Petrolage' at Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, 2022 'Petro-Melancholia' ARTE/ZDF documentary by Matthias Frick on their project. In 2024/2025 together with Nona Schulte-Römer from HU-Berlin Benjamin Steininger produced the podcast 'Synthesizer - Zur Zukunft von Chemie und Gesellschaft'.