Strange Brew: Art, Protest, and the Anti-Fracking Movement (original) (raw)
Related papers
Journal of Cultural Analysis and Social Change, 2018
Vista Alegre is a municipality in the province of Neuquén, Argentina. Situated in a region traditionally known for its fruticulture economy, Vista Alegre has recently been identified as a potential location for fracking, a development that has resulted in widespread opposition among its inhabitants. The fight against fracking in Vista Alegre has followed a number of channels, from road blockades to art festivals and a legal challenge to the municipality. This paper analyses the conflict focusing on the forms of community art and media employed by the local assembly against fracking to widen and sustain participation in the struggle, and the role that these media have in mediating collective identity processes in the fight against fracking. Building on the concept of mediated identities (Fornäs and Xinaris, 2013), I look at these community art and media practices as dialogical (Kester, 2004). I propose that activities such as art festivals, mural painting and open radios contribute to collective identity processes through three mediating tactics: participation, knowledge sharing and the event modality. I conclude by arguing that these forms of community arts and media can be seen as a productive output of the conflict (Merlinsky, 2015), as they become crucial practices of cultural resistance.
Hammering Art to Save Earth: Just Stop Oil's Gallery Protests
Philosophy Share, 2023
This piece examines Just Stop Oil's art gallery protests, probing the scepticism towards their methods. It compares their non-destructive activism with other forms of vandalism, like spray-painted tagging. The uniqueness of Earth and art targeted by the group is contrasted, highlighting the paradox of risking heritage to save the environment. The article reflects on whether such protests, resonant with Ai Wei Wei's provocative art, effectively sway public sentiment or are simply an alarming spectacle that provokes apprehension at the potential loss of irreplaceable cultural treasures.
Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space, 2021
In this paper, we investigate five activist-artistic approaches to argue for a sensory politics of the Anthropocene. Our aim is to highlight the affective and speculative potentials of art by examining how artists engage with the senses to make air pollution and its political implications visible, tangible, or otherwise experiential. The paper touches on widerreaching discourses on the politics of sensing, sensible politics, and sensory studies. Rather than situating air pollution within a policy framework, such as that of the international sustainable development goals, we locate our arguments within recent scholarship on postpolitics and the Anthropocene. Despite its episte-mological slipperiness, we consider the Anthropocene to be a potent heuristic as well as a rich resource of ideas, data, and collaborative and antagonistic potential for artists working on issues of air pollution. The five case studies are each grounded in an explicit engagement with at least one of the five basic senses and include works Laboratories (NL). Clustered into three lines of argumentation, we demonstrate the ways in which these works contribute to the politicization of air: first, by framing air as a contested common good that problematizes the commodification of clean air; second, by integrating artistic research and environmental communication strategies; and third, by providing sensory experiences of the complicated constellations of agency and perception in the interscalar phenomenon of air pollution. Although our analysis is not exhaustive, three particularities could be identified in the works: an openness to other forms of knowledge and communication; a potent critique of the Anthropocene; and a radical questioning of 'the political'. In conclusion, we argue that art can mobilize a sense of urgency and empowerment towards a multi-sensory politics of the Anthropocene.
The Good Ole’ Boy Extraction Club: An Eco-Feminist Critique of the Culture of Hydraulic Fracturing
The emergence of hydraulic fracturing—fracking—as a method of fossil fuel extraction presents a new and particularly virulent form of masculinist entitlement disguised as an appeal to “traditional values,” “patriotic duty,” “national security,” or “the public good.” This appeal disproportionately disadvantages “others,” particularly with respect to sex, ethnicity, and economic class, and “legitimates” a process of extraction that threatens the existential conditions of living things: clean water and breathable air. As the latest player in global capitalism’s exploitation of resources and labor, the “new” “good old boy” culture of fracking is a form of what amounts to genocidal profiteering.
Political Geography, 2020
This paper puts forward an anarchist political ecology critique of extreme energy extractivism by examining corporate and state responses (or 'political reactions from above') to anti-fracking resistance in the UK. The planned drilling for unconventional gas and oil through hydraulic fracturing has triggered unprecedented opposition , with protest camps, direct actions, and legal challenges disrupting operations and slowing down planning and exploration development. Drawing on green anarchist thought, critiques of extractivism, statism, and industrialism, and a (corporate) counterinsurgency framework, I examine the strategies adopted by drilling companies and state actors to manage resistance and win the 'hearts and minds' of the population, deploying tactics from greenwashing in local schools to harsh policing of dissent. The latter has included the criminalisation and stigmatisation of land defenders, targeting campaigners as 'domestic extremists', physical abuse, targeting protesters with disabilities, and entering public-private security partnerships with local police forces which involve the 'outsourcing' of police communication to drilling companies. Such actions are complimented by the contracting of PR firms, lobbying, sponsorships of sports clubs and school competitions, 'astroturfing', and influencing local so-called democratic procedures. This has gone hand in hand with political efforts to classify operation sites as 'Nationally Significant Infrastructure projects' to facilitate the suppression of protest. These strategies are embedded in a recently well-documented history of police infiltration and corporate spying, laying bare an unapologetic commitment to sacrifice human and nonhuman wellbeing for industrial growth, commitment to extractivist ideology and centralisation of power at the cost of further eroding local autonomy and control.
One global movement, many local voices: Discourse(s) of the global anti-fracking movement
This paper analyzes the dominant local and global diagnostic and prognostic frames of the anti-fracking movement using theoretical perspectives generated by Arturo Escobar and Michel Foucault that emphasize the articulation of alternative imaginaries, and power and discourse, respectively. Giovanna Di Chiro’s conceptualization of environmental justice is also engaged to help shed further light on the anti-fracking movement. How the anti-fracking movement conceptualizes the problems and the solutions complexifies the political debate on fracking which tends to bifurcate the controversy along environmental and economic development lines. The movement discourse(s) especially draws attention to: the construction and role of knowledge, the relationship between humans/culture and nature; and democratic legitimacy. This paper was subsequently published as a book chapter: Tamara Steger , Milos Milicevic (2014), One Global Movement, Many Local Voices: Discourse(s) of the Global Anti-Fracking Movement, in Liam Leonard , Sya Buryn Kedzior (ed.) Occupy the Earth: Global Environmental Movements (Advances in Sustainability and Environmental Justice, Volume 15) Emerald Group Publishing Limited, pp.1 - 35
Ethnos, 2021
Drawing on ethnographic research in two locations facing the prospect of shale gas exploration in Poland and the UK, I analyse how the future can be simultaneously predetermined and undetermined. Local actors handle this complex experience by relating to fracking infrastructures, fixing the materialities of shale gas as well as cultivating an air of conspiracy around the intricacies of gas developments. I focus on the everyday to broaden the scope of recent scholarly writing on resource indeterminacy that explores how corporate strategies create the futures of resource extraction. The contradictory temporalities that these strategies generate have to be reconciled at the sites of extraction. I call for opening our theorisations up to how resource indeterminacy and assertions of predetermined futures are mediated in the everyday contexts of noncorporate actors. By considering these daily forms of engagement with resource exploration, we gain a more realistic perspective on the potentialities of extraction.
Much of the analysis of hydraulic fracking by the social sciences pictures a discussion of opposing values. This paper seeks to use a multi-disciplinary approach (critical ethnography, philosophy, and cultural studies) to describe how hydraulic fracking can be viewed as a singular event-object of hegemonic dominance over different life-worlds. Through looking at how the frack acts physically, socially, and cognitively we see characteristics of refusal, occlusion, and disempowerment as intrinsic mechanisms belonging to the fracking object.