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SUMMARY:Landlocked: Oil\, Empire\, and Planetary Politics in Alberta - Dr 
 Jeremy Schmidt\, Queen Mary University of London
DTSTART:20251127T130000Z
DTEND:20251127T140000Z
UID:TALK239446@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:Richard Waters
DESCRIPTION:This talk examines what it means to be landlocked in the Canad
 ian province of Alberta. In the local vernacular\, being landlocked is onl
 y partly about lacking access to an ocean and\, from there\, global market
 s. Another aspect of being landlocked is more of a geopolitical condition 
 enforced by everybody from activists to American presidents seeking to sto
 p or slow extraction from the Alberta oil sands\, the world’s fourth lar
 gest reserve of fossil fuels. In this presentation I examine why this kind
  of talk is telling in another way: it is an alert to how the geosciences 
 that make extraction possible are also constitutive for political rational
 ity. To see how this is so\, I examine the histories of how geosciences ma
 ttered to projects of empire that established Alberta and its oil industry
 . This includes many surprises\, from British royalty seeking special righ
 ts to Alberta’s energy\, to American nuclear ambitions to melt heavy oil
  into production\, to legal practices that put millions of years of Earth
 ’s history on the same scale as the property rights used to legitimise e
 xtraction and dispossess Indigenous peoples. Additionally important is how
  Alberta’s energy industry is entangled with contemporary debates regard
 ing human impacts on the planet. As I will show\, closer attention to what
  being ‘landlocked’ presses for a new understanding of how the practic
 es through which the environment is known and related to shapes political 
 legitimacy.
LOCATION:Small Lecture Room\, Department of Geography
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