Cold Water Oil (Routledge Environmental Humanities)

Cold Water Oil: Offshore Petroleum Cultures is a collection of essays examining how societies conceive of fossil fuel extraction in the inhospitable but fragile waters of the North Atlantic and Arctic oceans.

What happens offshore matters. Currently, over a quarter of the world’s oil and gas is produced from beneath the seas. The offshore petroleum industry is thus a crucial point of origin for global carbon emissions, and other environmental harms. Cold Water Oil: Offshore Petroleum Cultures illuminates ignored histories, influential contemporary narratives, and emerging energy and environmental futures. The volume centres on North Atlantic and Arctic regions; the continuing but often strongly contested pursuit of oil and gas in frigid, tumultuous, and environmentally sensitive seas enforces the lengths to which corporations and governments will go to maintain the centrality of fossil fuels. The book’s contributors focus on the cultural, social, and ecological implications of oil and gas extraction in the oceanic territories of Canada, Norway, the UK, Russia, the US, and the Iñupiat of Alaska at a time of profound global uncertainty. In conversation with the energy and environmental humanities, and critical ocean studies, Cold Water Oil considers a region central to debates about climate change and the planet’s future.

Cold Water Oil engages students and researchers interested in climate change, energy humanities, critical ocean studies, and North Atlantic and Arctic issues.

Fiona Polack is Associate Professor in the Department of English at Memorial University of Newfoundland and Labrador, and Academic Editor at Memorial University Press. She researches and publishes in the fields of energy and environmental humanities, island studies, and settler colonial studies. She currently leads the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Insight project "Oil Rigs and Islands" (2020–25), which examines contemporary cultural figurations of place-making in the offshore world, and collaborates with Danine Farquharson on other energy humanities projects. Fiona Polack is co-author of After Oil (2016), with the Petrocultures Research Group. Her edited collection Tracing Ochre: Changing Perspectives on the Beothuk was published in 2018.

Danine Farquharson is Associate Professor of English at Memorial University. Her early research focused on masculinity and violence in contemporary Irish literature and film. More recently, her interests are in energy humanities, specifically collaborating with Fiona Polack. Together, they examine how the North Atlantic offshore oil and gas industry is imagined in a wide range of high and popular contexts – everything from oil company websites, to visual art, to literary fiction. She is the co-editor of Shadows of the Gunmen: Violence and Culture in Modern Ireland and the co-founder with Julia Wright of Dalhousie University of SSHORE: Social Science and Humanities Ocean Research and Education.