Henry Austin
henryaustin@hks.harvard.edu
The American “fracking revolution” has transformed the United States into the world’s leading petrostate, to earth-shattering geopolitical, economic, and ecological effect. This talk, drawn from a larger book project, proposes that fracking exemplifies a still more consequential shift in the metaphysics of US power. Building on ethnographic fieldwork in the Permian Basin oil fields, I explore how a century of fossil fuel extraction has not only exploited the planet but also reconstituted it ontologically. Increasingly, state and corporation address the Earth not as a finite resource base delimited by natural history but as an infinitely adjustable machine for potentially limitless energy generation. I draw out some provocations of this turn for the social study of technoscience and its potential contributions to critical theories of imperialism.
Cameron Hu studies the technopolitics of American power across contexts of fossil fuels, war, transnational environmentalism, and earth science. He is currently completing Planet Texas, a global ethnography of American fracking. His recent work includes “Carbon Consequentialism,” forthcoming in Science Technology & Human Values; “Postcolonial Technoscience Revisited,” published in Social Studies of Science; and “Fracking and Historicizing,” Cultural Anthropology’s most-read article of the past two years. Cameron received a PhD from the University of Chicago, where his dissertation, “Knowing Destroying,” received the Daniel F. Nugent Prize in Historical Anthropology. He is currently Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at Wesleyan University’s Center for the Humanities. From September 2026, he will be a Fellow of the Aarhus Institute of Advanced Studies.
LOCATION:CGIS South, S354 STATUS:CONFIRMED DTSTART:20260406T161500Z DTEND:20260406T180000Z END:VEVENT END:VCALENDAR