Field crew member Professor Holmgren (of Franklin and Marshall College, PA) documents a historic cemetery surrounded by a Type II camp just south of Tioga, ND in August 2012.
The Western Social Science Association's abstract deadline for the April 2013 conference in Denver, Colorado is but a day away. So in the last three days, I put together two disparate abstracts (one for a paper and one for a poster) and submitted them to the conference committee. The paper proposal draws from August 2012 research in the man or labor camps in western North Dakota's Bakken oil fields, and builds off existing scholarship at this link here. (Note: North Dakota is #2 for oil production in the United States, just behind Texas).
The paper will broadly touch on how and why an area is populated, depopulated, and then repopulated (or re-re-populated, ad infinitum), but focus in on the micro, or what in the business we call individual lives. Contextualizing the micro within the macro, the local within the broader theme. Sometimes historians say those sorts of things in academic papers, or in conversation in general.
In August 2012, a collaborative team of historians, archaeologists, architects, sociologists and photographers spent four days studying the labor and "man" camps associated with the Bakken oil boom in rural western North Dakota. While there is monetary success and tragedy inherent in any petroleum boom, the team documented the ways in which skilled and un-skilled laborers carved out their own identities. This captured how an oil boom is much more dynamic than the typical media reporting of it as 100% "good" or absolutely "bad." Humans are much more complex. This paper considers how a selection of individuals came to work in the Bakken oil field, and how they find lodging, food and hygiene on a day-to-day basis in a rural environment with limited infrastructure.
This entry was posted on Friday, November 30th, 2012 at 7:49 am	and tagged with Bakken, North Dakota, Western Social Science Association and posted in Uncategorized.	You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.