Extractions

a tanker truck and gas or oil well

EXTRACTIONS/HNRC 4013H-002
W 2:00-4:50 p.m., FALL 2022
GEAR 129

View Dr. Jensen's March 28 Public Preview Lecture (1 hour).

Hear Dr. Jensen talk about the course on NPR (12 minutes).

Interested? Current students can apply online. Application deadline: Midnight, Thursday, March 31.
Questions? Contact John Treat

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This Signature Seminar is designed to introduce students to the human costs of extractive industries. The course will consider our world’s demand for raw materials, energy, and human capital in the context of climate crisis. The practice and concepts of extraction will be studied broadly through political, environmental and socio-economic approaches.

Questions central to our inquiry include: How do we balance our material needs and wants with the environmental and societal impacts of these extractions? What are the human costs of these extractions, and how can studying these costs help lead us toward solutions? How are race, class and gender factors in who benefits or is harmed by extractive practices?

We’ll dive deeply into the lives of those affected by oil and gas extraction, mining, forestry, and commercial agriculture and food production. Those include the lives of workers and landowners, corporation executives and pipeline protestors, politicians and climate scientists alike. In Extractions, students will work toward layered knowledge both of these industries and of the people and places most affected by them.

Course Credit:

  • All-students: 3 hours of honors credit
  • Fulbright College:
    • English upper-level credit
    • Fulbright Honors humanities colloquium credit
    • Fulbright Honors social science colloquium credit
    • Indigenous Studies Minor upper-level credit
  • Walton College: honors colloquium credit

About Toni Jensen:

Toni Jensen

Toni Jensen is the author of Carry: A Memoir of Survival on Stolen Land, a memoir-in-essays about gun violence, land and Indigenous people’s lives (Ballantine 2020), and a short story collection, From the Hilltop. She is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Literature fellowship in nonfiction for 2020 and a Sustainable Arts Foundation fellowship in 2019. Her essays have been published in journals such as Orion, Catapult and Ecotone. She’s an Associate Professor in Creative Writing and Indigenous Studies at the University of Arkansas and also teaches in the low residency MFA Program at the Institute of American Indian Arts. She received her doctorate from Texas Tech University and is the recipient of fellowship support from the Lannan Foundation, the Sowell Family Foundation, the Norcroft Foundation, UCross, Hedgebrook, and the Virginia Faulkner Fund. She is Métis.