This is a public lecture by Valerie Olson, Assistant Professor of Anthropology, University of California, Irvine.
Oil fuels economies and toxifies environments. What is less clear, but equally powerful, is oil’s paradoxical role materializing ecological relations. This talk explores how ecosystems are becoming governable forms of multidimensional transterritorial space. It follows how the political ecology of the contemporary Gulf is emerging through its political systematicity.