Becoming Seismic: Subsurface Geoscience and Everyday Political Struggles in Oklahoma’s Fracking-Earthquakes Controversy
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Since 2011, an unprecedented case of seismic reactivation in Oklahoma became controversially linked to fracking – a novel, widespread model of oil and gas extraction. These geological instabilities, which became officially categorized as “induced seismicity,” confounded popular and scientific assumptions about the connections between the surface-based features of place and social life and subsurface processes. Becoming Seismic is an ethnographic study of the social and political impacts of fracking-induced seismicity in Oklahoma and the dynamics of knowledge contestation that unfolded. It examines how conflicts arising from fracking-induced seismicity have altered political realities, discourses, and subjectivities in Oklahoma and in the process reshaped distinctions between the objects of concern in geological science and those in everyday political struggles. Participant observation and interviews were conducted among government and academic geoscientists, citizen-scientists, activists, local residents, and indigenous leaders developing distinct tools and procedures to understand and address profound changes in their relationship with the earth below them vis-à-vis the legacies and futures of Oklahoma’s fossil fuel economy. This dissertation challenges popular and scholarly portrayals of geoscience as a static and monolithic field. Instead, it shows how nascent geological instabilities can interact with the ways people experience mechanisms of state power, re-shaping people’s agencies as these become entangled in shifting scientific cultures, and opening new political capacities for geoscience as a framework and praxis. Ultimately, it argues that in the age of “unconventional” oil and gas development in the US, new forms of geological knowledge are increasingly connected to new social and political projects, and as a result, subsurface geoscience has newly emerged as a negotiated realm of knowledge claims where “expert” and “lay” groups alike grapple with and even redefine how they understand themselves and the places in which they dwell.
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