Oil and water; climate change attribution in Houston, Texas
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- This dissertation is about the political life of scientific evidence in Houston during intensified flood infrastructure planning process after Hurricane Harvey. It approaches what might be considered climate denial with ethnographic sensitivity to embodied custom to provide an anthropological account of climate change misinformation. Drawing on eighteen months of ethnographic and archival research, it analyzes anti-science sentiment at the center of oil-based capitalism where engineers, lawyers and business professionals negotiated facts and factuality across concrete and through floodwaters. This dissertation puts climate misinformation into a longer history of industrial story telling from nineteenth century booster narratives to present day public relations campaigns. It argues that the consequential lie in Houston was not "climate change isn't real." It was "fuel is cheap." This lie requires business people and politicians to discipline liability through idiom and affect to maintain the semantic separation between industrial action and industrial harm, between oil and water, without which fuel would not be cheap in this century or the last.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Form | electronic resource; remote; computer; online resource |
| Extent | 1 online resource. |
| Place | California |
| Place | [Stanford, California] |
| Publisher | [Stanford University] |
| Copyright date | 2023; ©2023 |
| Publication date | 2023; 2023 |
| Issuance | monographic |
| Language | English |
Creators/Contributors
| Author | Friedan, Nataya |
|---|---|
| Degree supervisor | Yanagisako, Sylvia Junko, 1945- |
| Thesis advisor | Yanagisako, Sylvia Junko, 1945- |
| Thesis advisor | Bauer, Andrew M |
| Thesis advisor | Ebron, Paulla A, 1953- |
| Thesis advisor | Inoue, Miyako, 1962- |
| Degree committee member | Bauer, Andrew M |
| Degree committee member | Ebron, Paulla A, 1953- |
| Degree committee member | Inoue, Miyako, 1962- |
| Associated with | Stanford University, School of Humanities and Sciences |
| Associated with | Stanford University, Department of Anthropology |
Subjects
| Genre | Theses |
|---|---|
| Genre | Text |
Bibliographic information
| Statement of responsibility | Nataya Friedan. |
|---|---|
| Note | Submitted to the Department of Anthropology. |
| Thesis | Thesis Ph.D. Stanford University 2023. |
| Location | https://purl.stanford.edu/cq386py4929 |
Access conditions
- Copyright
- © 2023 by Nataya Friedan
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