Our history
The Petrocultures Research Group was founded in 2011 at the University of Alberta by Imre Szeman and Sheena Wilson.
We hosted our first conference at the University of Alberta in Edmonton in 2012. The now biennial conference has grown in size and diversity ever since, with subsequent gatherings in Montreal, QC (2014), St. John’s, NL (2016), and Glasgow, Scotland (2018). COVID-19 delayed the fifth Petrocultures conference, which has been rescheduled for 2022 in Stavanger, Norway.
Petrocultures has organized two After Oil Schools (AOS), with a third planned to begin in 2021. AOS is a discussion and writing event that brings together academic researchers, artists, and policymakers to advance energy humanities research. AOS 1 took place at the University of Alberta in 2015, resulting in the influential, collectively-authored text After Oil. AOS 2: Solarity brought together a new group of collaborators at the Centre for Canadian Architecture in Montreal to reflect on the challenges and possibilities of a social transition to energy systems and communities organized around the energy of the sun. Several publications resulted, including a forthcoming collectively-authored text and a special issue of South Atlantic Quarterly.
AOS 3 launches in 2021, featuring a new format and set of concerns. Additional AOS projects will be launched in 2021 and 2022.
The Petrocultures Research Group also supports the publication of new research. In addition to the excellent independent work of our members, Petrocultures supported the establishment of an Energy Humanities book series with Johns Hopkins University Press. In 2017, Sheena Wilson, Adam Carlson, and Imre Szeman edited Petrocultures: Oil, Politics, Culture, published by McGill-Queen’s University Press.
Our mandate
Our mandate is to support, produce, and distribute leading-edge energy humanities research. Through our network and funding, we connect researchers to generate new insights about energy and culture. We host conferences, organize workshops, run an academic leadership hub, work with communities engaged in building new energy futures, fund postdoctoral fellows, and manage a listserv.
Petrocultures members are engaged in research about different topics, places, and eras related to energy. Among the issues that this research investigates are:
- Labour in petrocultures (influx of temporary foreign workers, transient labour forces, the rights or lack thereof of labourers, etc.)
- The composition of communities in historical and contemporary oil economies
- Education in energy societies
- Health
- The intersection of cultural and environmental issues (resource management, water and oil, etc.)
- Indigenous cultures and societies (land and mineral rights, community safety, race in petrocultures, etc.)
- Intersectional impacts of energy systems
- Politics and social-political life in petro-states
- The impacts of all of these issues on forms of cultural production (art, literature, film, etc.) that attempt to represent and address the socio-cultural realities of living alongside oil technologies
- Potential future energy systems and societies
Our sponsors
Our members
See the Petrocultures members who are changing how we think about the social, cultural, and political dimensions of energy.
Become a member
You can join us! Head to our Members page to learn more and submit a membership application.