Paper short abstract:

The work of oil extraction in Western Canada is rife with movement, violence, and implication, partnering humans and machines against 'nature'. Through a phenomenological lens, this paper explores the implications of these sites of cultural exchange and making.

Paper long abstract:

The collision between Earth and industry is one fraught with impactful movement, creating a series of localities for wrestling with potentially explosive notions of work and 'nature'. In Western Canada, land-based petroleum extraction is a complex mechanical dance, one in which humans and machines are partners in dominating a physical environment, so often apprehended as passively resource laden and ripe for plunder. This paper explores the positionality of such a physical environment and its (il)logical categorization, and grapples with the phenomenological and philosophical ramifications of human engagement with a constructed nature that is simultaneously passive and yielding, vengeful and dangerous. Drawing on the perspectives of Bordieu, Haraway and Heidegger, as well as personal experience and fieldwork, the author seeks to challenge ways of 'knowing' about nature, and suggests that knowing can simultaneously support and destabilize large-scale industrial work and the people who perform it.