Settling the Boom: The Sites and Subjects of Bakken Oil

Settling the Boom explores how an oil boom in the northern Great Plains is contained through the extension of settler temporalities,reassertions of heteropatriarchy,and the tethering of life to the volatility of oil and its cruel optimisms. This collection reveals the results of sustained research in Williston, North Dakota, the epicenter of the "Bakken Boom."

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 248 pages
Publication date: 04 April 2023
Publisher: University of Minnesota Press

Over the past decade, the emergence of new oil plays has profoundly transformed the U.S. energy landscape and reshaped the country's imagination. Settling the Boom delves into the intricate ways in which the disruptive forces of an oil boom in the northern Great Plains are contained and managed. Through the extension of settler temporalities, reassertions of heteropatriarchy, and the tethering of life to the volatility of oil and its relentless optimism, the book explores how the unsettling impacts of an oil play are resolved.

This collection offers a comprehensive examination of the "Bakken Boom," the epicenter of which is Williston, North Dakota. While the boom brought about a rapid influx of capital and workers, Settling the Boom challenges the simplistic notion of a before and after scenario. Instead, it demonstrates how the unsettling forces of an oil play are mitigated through normative narratives and material and affective infrastructures that support settler colonialisms violent expansion and its gendered orders of time and space.

Drawing on a diverse range of evidence, including urban and regional policy, interviews with city officials, media, photography, and film, the essays in this book analyze the ongoing material, aesthetic, and narrative ways of life and land in the Bakken. Contributors to the volume include Morgan Adamson from Macalester College, Kai Bosworth from Virginia Commonwealth U, Thomas S. Davis from Ohio State U, and Jessica Lehman from Durham U.

Through its insightful analysis, Settling the Boom sheds light on the complex interplay between oil, settler colonialism, and gender, providing a valuable contribution to the study of energy, land, and the politics of place.

Weight: 227g
Dimension: 216 x 140 x 13 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781517913878