The contested landscape of unconventional energy development: a report from Ohio's shale gas country

<b>Engaging the Underground: An STS Field in Formation</b>

“…This water-intensive extraction technique, coupled with failures in the underground infrastructure used to transport it to the surface, can damage human health and wellbeing by contaminating water and air. The rapid expansion of hydraulic fracturing activity close to US communities in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Texas, and Colorado prompted scholars to track the environmental and social risks and harms, along with forms of community and political organization to mitigate them (Kroepsch 2016;Perry 2012;Espig and de Rijke 2016;Willow et al 2014;Eaton and Kinchy 2016;Partridge et al 2017;Smith 2017a, 2017b). Citizen science and other forms of public engagement 7 Other recent STS contributions to making sense of the underground have addressed topics ranging from the interpretation of remote data sources in petroleum reservoir geology to decision making about geothermal energy to conspiracy stories about the definition of geological boundaries around protected sites, among other subjects with public relevance (Almklov 2008;Almklov and Hepsø 2011;Raman 2013;Gilbert 2015;Rahder 2015;Barandiaran 2015;Gross 2015;Pijpers 2016;Bleicher and Gross 2016;Sareen 2016;Oskarsson 2017). in science have been key features of these controversies, as activists and concerned communities aim to fill the gaps in "undone science" (Kinchy 2017;Kinchy, Parks, and Jalbert 2016;Malone et al 2015;Jalbert and Kinchy 2016;Wylie et al 2016;Vera 2016;Zilliox and Smith 2018).…”

Engineering and the Politics of Commensuration in the Mining and Petroleum Industries

“…Anna Willow's (2014) research in Ohio, for example, documents the transformations that have accompanied the unconventional energy boom and altered residents' relationships with landscapes that are increasingly understood as untrustable. Yet when industry or company personnel refused to be interviewed or were unresponsive to interview requests, she chose to review and code "publicly available statements that addressed social and environmental aspects of corporate sustainability" (2014: 58) in the same manner as the interviews she conducted with residents.…”

“…More recently, they have analyzed the escalating conflicts between companies and their critics, grounding their work in the groups and social movements opposed to extractive activity (e.g. Jalbert et al 2017;Kirsch 2006Kirsch , 2014McNeil 2011;Sawyer 2004;Willow et al 2014). Engineers and applied scientists rarely feature as actors in these accounts, with a few notable exceptions that engage anthropology along with STS (e.g.…”

Politics, ecology, and the new anthropology of energy: exploring the emerging frontiers of hydraulic fracking

“…Much of this work, however, has been informed by quantitative survey methods rather than qualitative ethnographic inquiry (e.g., Anderson and Theodori 2009;Brasier et al 2011;Jacquet 2012;Theodori 2009). Notable exceptions include Simona Perry's comparative consideration of the place-based consequences of regional and national energy politics in the "global countryside" (2011), Perry's more direct demonstration of ethnography's value as a tool for monitoring community health in unconventional energy production zones (2013; see also Wylie 2011), recent examinations of the political production and/or obfuscation of risk in the face of uncertainty about fracking's actual effects (Cartwright 2013;Finewood and Stroup 2012), and ethnographic overviews of unfolding conflicts surrounding unconventional extraction (e.g., de Rijke 2013ade Rijke , 2013bPearson 2013;Willow et al 2014). These articles have added valuable voices to the conversation and, in the process, made a strong case for qualitative research on fracking.…”