Tight oil/fast oil: life and death in the Bakken oil fields

Workers have been dying on the job with unusual frequency in the North Dakota oil boom. This talk explores the geological, technological, and political-economic conditions by which ‘tight oil’ becomes ‘fast oil’, with consequences for workers and communities locally, nationally, and globally.

Bruce Braun is Professor of Geography, Environment and Society at the University of Minnesota. His research interests include geosocial formations, geontology, extraction and extractive capital; green urbanism and apparatuses of government, critical studies of urban sustainability, urban resilience as mode of government, design activism; the politics of ‘life’, political rationality and biological existence, the securitization of biological life, biosecurity and empire.