Settling the Boom: The Sites and Subjects of Bakken Oil - Mary E. Thomas - Books - University of Minnesota Press - 9781517913878 - February 28, 2023
In case cover and title do not match, the title is correct

Settling the Boom: The Sites and Subjects of Bakken Oil


Get an email once the item is available
Do you have a profile? Log in
Get notified about new Mary E. Thomas releases
Add to your iMusic wish list

Not rated yet

Examines how settler colonial and sexist infrastructures and narratives order a resource boom

Over the past decade, new oil plays have unsettled U. S. energy landscapes and imaginaries. Settling the Boom studies how the disruptive forces of an oil boom in the northern Great Plains are 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." While the boom brought a rapid influx of capital and workers, the book questions simple timelines of before and after. Instead, Settling the Boom demonstrates how the unsettling forces of an oil play resolve through normative narratives and material and affective infrastructures that support settler colonialism's violent extension and its gendered orders of time and space. Considering a wide range of evidence, from urban and regional policy, interviews with city officials, media, photography, and film, these essays analyze the ongoing material, aesthetic, and narrative ways of life and land in the Bakken.

Contributors: Morgan Adamson, Macalester College; Kai Bosworth, Virginia Commonwealth U; Thomas S. Davis, Ohio State U; Jessica Lehman, Durham U.
show more


248 pages, 36 black and white illustrations

Media Books     Paperback Book   (Book with soft cover and glued back)
Released February 28, 2023
ISBN13 9781517913878
Publishers University of Minnesota Press
Pages 248
Dimensions 140 × 215 × 15 mm   ·   314 g
Language English  
Editor Braun, Bruce
Editor Thomas, Mary E.

More by Mary E. Thomas

Show all

More from the same publisher