Sioux Falls: A Comics Anthology

A project of Emily Roehl's ENGL 200: Comics & Graphic Narratives course, Augustana University, Spring 2023. Front cover image by Gracie Korstjens; back cover image by Jade Hoffman; AugieCon logo by Tarah Hill. All rights remain with the artists

Pageants, Po' Boys, and Pork on a Stick: Documenting the Louisiana Shrimp and Petroleum Festival

This photoessay documents the 82nd Annual Louisiana Shrimp and Petroleum Festival, which took place in Morgan City, Louisiana over Labor Day weekend in 2018. It contains photographs of the festival, including images of pageant queens, food vendors, and the Blessing of the Fleet. The essay documents the authors’ experience of the festival, and chronicles its long history from its origins as a shrimping industry labor festival to its current status as a major component of the statewide Louisiana harvest festival and pageant circuit. Oral histories and interviews with shrimpers, oil boat owners, festival employees, and pageant queens are featured. The article considers the dominance of the Gulf oil industry and its impact on other Gulf industries, the impact that the decline of shrimping in St. Mary Parish has had on Vietnamese shrimping communities, the gendered and classed performances of the festival’s pageant, and the historic divisions along race and class lines in coastal Louisiana that the festival both reveals and helps to heal. The article includes an analysis of the connections between food and oil, and how the food for sale at the festival challenged embedded stereotypes of southern and Louisianan cuisine

Making and Meeting Online: A White Paper on E-Conferences, Workshops, and Other Experiments in Low-Carbon Research Exchange

Academics fly a lot: to research sites and archives, to conferences and workshops. Yet flying has many negative repercussions. Air travel has disproportionate climate impacts, and for reasons of time, money, and border security, produces many barriers for marginalized scholars, shaping who is able shows up at conferences and thus, who participates in the conversations that define a community of study. Forms of knowledge exchange that do not depend on aviation are thus urgently needed. E-conferences offer on such possibility. As scholars of media and energy, and as e-conference organizers and participants ourselves, we wrote this white paper to highlight what’s worked in the past, what hazards lie ahead for the future, and what potential gains could be won in the present. We hope our words will be useful to small conference organizers and professional associations alike. Our aim is not to end in-person meetings but rather to foster effective low-carbon alternatives that can help reduce the amount of travel necessary to participate in global knowledge communities. Meeting together in person is invaluable, but we can augment it with effective alternatives through critical reflection and smart design choices. We aim to spark further reflections and innovations in collaborative experiments in digital research exchange - or even other forms of scholarly community. We hope such experimentation continues long after the pandemic is over, and that its effects will shape the university for the better

Energy In/Out of Place

This book, and the online workshop that preceded it, are attempts to intensify the sense of place within our scholarship and in our scholarly practices. They are formed from the efforts of five research teams examining energy cultures in five different locations around the world. Team members weren’t necessarily experts on their given places, but many were bound to these sites through time, kith, and kin

Introduction to Critical and Creative Engagements with Petro-Media

The production of oil is imbricated in financial and socio-political systems as well as ways of mediating the worlds in which we live. Like infrastructures used to transport fuel, audio-visual media and other forms of cultural production (museums, poetry, film, visual art) can serve as conduits for ideas about energy, identity, relationships to the nonhuman world, and history. This special issue of Imaginations on “Critical and Creative Engagements with Petro-Media” explores how media has been used to examine petroleum’s place within Canadian and American cultural landscapes as well as oil’s attendant socio-political and economic structures. Given our location on occupied Indigenous territories where we work as researchers and educators, we assert that energy developments are always already implicated within histories of white settlement in North America. Drawing on literary and film studies, energy humanities scholarship, critical museum studies, and a variety of creative and analytical research methods, the contributors to this issue theorize contemporary and historical practices of corporate petro-media alongside creative interventions to trace the interlacing of oil, media, and settler colonialism.La production de pétrole est imbriquée dans les systèmes financiers et sociopolitiques ainsi que dans les modes de médiation des milieux dans lesquels nous vivons. À l'instar des infrastructures utilisées pour transporter le carburant, les médias audiovisuels et d'autres formes de production culturelle (musées, poésie, films, arts visuels) peuvent servir de vecteurs d'idées sur l'énergie, l'identité, les relations avec le monde non humain et l'histoire. Ce numéro spécial d’Imaginations sur “Les engagements critiques et créatifs avec les pétro-média” explore certaines des façons dont les médias ont été utilisés pour examiner la place du pétrole dans les paysages culturels canadiens et américains, ainsi que les structures socio-politiques et économiques qui y sont associées. Étant donné que nous nous trouvons sur des territoires autochtones occupés où nous travaillons comme chercheurs et éducateurs, nous affirmons que les développements énergétiques sont toujours déjà impliqués dans l’histoire de la colonisation blanche en Amérique du Nord. En s'appuyant sur des études littéraires et cinématographiques, sur les sciences humaines de l'énergie, sur des études muséales critiques et sur une variété de méthodes de recherche créatives et analytiques, les contributeurs de ce numéro théorisent les pratiques contemporaines et historiques des entreprises pétro-médiatiques et les interventions créatives afin de retracer l'entrelacement du pétrole, des médias et du colonialisme de peuplement