Critical Petroaesthetics

Scholars of literature, media, rhetoric, musicology, theology, and political science are looking for answers to these questions.

Petroleum is more than fuel. The cultural impact of this subterranean energy source has been immense over the past century. On the one hand, oil has been the very blood of modern global society, associated with wealth, ingenuity, progress, and movement. On the other hand, petroleum signifies exploitation of natural recourses, dangerous working conditions, decadent company cultures, and widespread pollution. How is this ambivalence reflected across genres, art forms and levels of policy making?

Critical Petroaesthetics is a multi-layered heading, pointing at the increasing numbers of books, films, exhibitions and other cultural products expressing critique of the powerful petroleum industry, but also at how politicians and oil companies make use of embellishing metaphors and narratives in their public image grooming. The petro-material reality of many cultural products add further dimensions to the significance of critical petroaesthetics.

News

• Julia Leyda's book Anthroposcreens is out (July 2023), including a chapter on petroguilt in Norwegian television.
• MSCA Postdoctoral Fellow Rinni Haji Amran on oil, environment and national identity in Bruneian fiction at EcoLit (13 October, 2022)
• We are represented at the conference Petrocultures 2022: Transformations in Stavanger (24-27 August, 2022).
• Graeme Macdonald on the fiction of decommissioning (public talk at UiO, 14 June 2022)
• Katie Ritson on invisible oil in Roy Jacobsen's Barrøy novels (Edda, May 2022)
• Kristian Bjørkdahl on how Norway mixed oil and water at Expo '92 (Culture Unbound, July 2021)
• Petroculture is a central topic in our co-written article Climate Change in Literature, Television and Film from Norway (Ecozon@ Vol 11, No. 2 2020)
• Kyle Devine on the environmental impact of the vinyl revival (The Guardian, 28 Jan 2020)

Activities

Over the two years of initial funding, the collaboratory will organize a reading group and two workshops (2021–2022). Considering the importance of linguistic diversity at the Oslo School of Environmental Humanities and the adjoining community, the reading group sessions will alternate between Norwegian/Scandinavian and English.

From August 2023, members of the group are continuing collaborating as the RCN funded project Translatability of Oil: Critical Petro-Aesthetics at Work.

Principal investigator

• Sissel Furuseth

Collaborators at UiO

External collaborators