Land, Resources, and a Politic of Affect: Navigating Girlhood in Oil Country (WGF - Dissertation Fieldwork Grant)

This resource is an application for a Dissertation Fieldwork Grant from the Wenner-Gren Foundation. Set against a backdrop of ‘I love oil and gas’ bumper stickers, Texas and Roughrider flags, pro-Trump and antivaccine rhetoric, and American style populist politics, in this study I explore the ways in which girlhood is constituted through embodied markers and affective constellations of (un)belonging and (dis)connection in relation to the local fossil fuel and agricultural industries of southeast Saskatchewan. I approach this research acknowledging that girls’ lives do not emerge in a vacuum, but from the interactional context in which they are deeply entangled including their family stories, their social landscapes, and their relationships of trust. By engaging with intersectional approaches, I explore the various racialized, classed, gendered, and sexualized experiences that constitute local notions of ‘girl’ and ‘girlhood’ and the ways in which girls engage with these affective and embodied experiences to navigate, reify, and challenge normative conceptions of girlhood. With attention to a politics of affect, I seek to illustrate the situated and ethical orientations of the specificities of rural Saskatchewan and the possibilities for attending to girls’ various responses towards the complex and messy worlds in which they live and which they are inheriting.