Jordan Kinder
Jordan B. Kinder is a media studies and environmental humanities scholar and activist from what is now called northern British Columbia. He is a citizen of the Métis Nation of Alberta, and is currently a SSHRC-FRQSC Postdoctoral Fellow at McGill University in the Department of Art History & Communication Studies. He holds a PhD in English and Film Studies from the University of Alberta where he wrote a dissertation that studies the cultural politics of energy, media, infrastructure, and environment through a case study of the burgeoning pro-oil social movement in Canada. His new research project, Between Foreclosure and Possibility: Competing Energy Imaginaries in the Contemporary Canadian Mediascape, examines extractive and post-extractive energy and infrastructural imaginaries through a series of infrastructural case studies and the cultural narratives that enframe them. Contact: jordan.kinder@mail.mcgill.ca.
Projects
Between Foreclosure and Possibility: Energy Imaginaries in the Contemporary Canadian Mediascape (Postdoctoral Research Project; McGill University, ongoing) studies extractive and post-extractive energy imaginaries across the contemporary Canadian mediascape. Isolating a series of case studies ranging from the Trans Mountain Expansion Pipeline Project to Sacred Earth Solar’s community-based solar infrastructure initiatives, Between Foreclosure and Possibility theorizes two competing energy and infrastructural imaginaries on offer today: one of foreclosure that reproduces already-existing energetic and infrastructural relations tied to extraction and petroculture and one of possibility that foregrounds post-extractive relations. This project has two main objectives: 1) to provide a deeper understanding of the relationship between the social and cultural dimensions of energy and infrastructure and their material dimensions by approaching energy infrastructure as media and 2) to theorize the possibilities of socially and ecologically just energy regimes. It is funded by postdoctoral fellowships from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and the Fonds de recherche du Québec - Société et culture.
Liquid Ethics, Fluid Politics (PhD Dissertation; University of Alberta, completed 2019) traces the emergence of the pro-oil social movement in Canada over the 2010s—a phenomenon and emergent archive he calls “petroturfing.” Introducing the concepts of energy consciousness and legitimation through circulation to describe and critique how these groups, organizations, and campaigns mobilize social media to promote Canadian oil from a self-identified grassroots position, Liquid Ethics, Fluid Politics offers significant contributions to contemporary debates in the energy humanities and in media studies. The project was primarily funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, as well as through University of Alberta-based awards including the Andrew Stewart Graduate Memorial Prize. He is currently revising this project into a manuscript.
After Oil is a collective of researchers the cultural politics of energy transition that has hosted two multi-day workshops in 2015 and 2019. The first gathered over 35 activists, artists, and researchers to intensively think and write about the politics and aesthetics of energy transition, which culminated in the volume After Oil. The second, hosted at the Canadian Centre for Architecture in partnership with McGill University, gathered 70 activists, artists, and researchers around the question of solar futures underwritten by the notion of “solarity.”
The Petrocultures Research Group is an international cluster of humanities and social science researchers who work on the social and cultural implications of oil and energy. The group was founded by Imre Szeman and Sheena Wilson leading up to its first conference in Edmonton, Alberta in 2012 and has since hosted conferences in St. John’s, Newfoundland and Labrador (2016) and in Glasgow, Scotland (2018). The next conference will be in Stavanger, Norway. Jordan served as the Petrocultures Research Group’s primary research assistant from 2015 to 2019 and Research Director from August 2019 to April 2020.
Publications
Jordan B. Kinder and Lucie Stepanik, eds. (2020). “Oil and Media, Oil as Media,” MediaTropes, 7 (2), https://mediatropes.com/index.php/Mediatropes/issue/view/2235.
Jordan B. Kinder. (2019). “Sustaining Petrocultures: The Politics and Aesthetics of Oil Sands Reclamation.” Energy Culture: Art and Theory on Oil and Beyond , edited by Jeff Diamanti and Imre Szeman, 93-103, Morgantown, WV: West Virginia UP,
https://wvupressonline.com/node/805 . (Liquid Ethics, Fluid Politics)
Jordan B. Kinder. (2018). “‘In the Heat of this Ongoing Past’: Three Lessons on Energy, Climate, and Materialism.” Mediations: Journal of the Marxist Literary Group, 31 (2), 157-164, http://www.mediationsjournal.org/toc/critique_of_energy
Jordan B. Kinder. (2016). “The Coming Transition: Fossil Capital and Our Energy Future.” Socialism and Democracy, 30 (2), 8-27, https://www.tandfonline.com/toc/csad20/30/2.
Petrocultures Research Group. (2016). After Oil, Morgantown, WV: West Virginia UP, https://wvupressonline.com/node/645 (After Oil; Petrocultures Research Group)
Activity
Petrocultures 2020: Transformations. 26-29 August 2020 [Postponed to 2021]. Transformations is the fourth Petrocultures conference and will be hosted in Stavanger, Norway at the Norwegian Petroleum Museum. See the conference websites for details and updates: https://petrocultures2020.wixsite.com/transformations.
Humanities on the Brink: Energy, Environment, Emergency. 10-31 July 2020. A virtual, nearly carbon neutral (NCN) conference sponsored by the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (ASLE) and hosted by the University of California, Santa Barbara co-organized with Jacob Goessling and Bart Welling.