John Kendall
267 19th Ave S
Minneapolis,
MN
55455
My dissertation research focuses on the spatial and financial technologies of the North American oil industry, with a particular focus on the development of the upstream sector along the Gulf Coast. Through archival materials, qualitative fieldwork, and an extensive interdisciplinary study of the secondary literature, my dissertation highlights the entanglement and interdependency of oil, finance, and IT, identified in terms of changes to the forms of ‘mediation’ through which oil flows out of and across the earth. Thus, for instance, computers have for decades now helped prospectors find more oil by mediating oilfields as statistical data aggregated into 4D graphical models which are more easily interpreted than, e.g., paper cross sections. In a different way, financial vehicles like oil futures help mediate oil by assigning it value as an asset which can be traded and hence generate revenue prior to its physical extraction. By tracking these transformations, my dissertation troubles distinctions commonly made in political ecological scholarship between an oil sector apparently nearing obsolescence and the more ‘adaptive’ sectors of the economy (e.g., finance and IT) supposed to supersede it.
Educational Background
- MA: Geography, University of Minnesota, 2018
- BA: Cultural Studies, Arabic Minor, The Ohio State University, 2015
Specialties
- geography of energy
- political economy
- history of science and technology