CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2017
| Author | Luetmer, Sadie Marie |
|---|---|
| Title | Placing Pipelines: Enbridge Energy and the politics of space and nature in Northern Minnesota |
| Summary | This thesis is about how oil pipelines matter in Northern Minnesota: how they matter to resource capital, and how they matter to the people who live there. This research approaches the recent controversies over oil pipelines in Minnesota as questions of emplaced politics, interrogating how oil pipelines and Canadian energy transport company Enbridge Energy are meaningful at a local level. This research does not ask whether pipelines should pass through Minnesota or not, but rather why they have in the past, how they do now, and what sort of power relations and social processes facilitate their endorsement and resistance among people who live in the region. It is argued here that the local politics of oil pipelines in Minnesota are best conceptualized as expressions of historical and contemporary struggles over space, place-making, and the production of nature, whereby locals must navigate the tensions and contradictions between the externality of global flows and the locality of their own emplacement. In pipeline politics these forces meet and struggle over claims about nature, value, and the environments that should or should not be (re)built. |
| Supervisor | Kalb, Donaitus Pius; Rajaram, Prem Kumar; Kappeler, Aaron |
| Department | Sociology MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2017/luetmer_sadie.pdf |
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