Oil and Social Change in Niger and Chad: An Anthropological Cooperative ResearchProject on Technologies, Signification and Processes of Creative Adaption in Relation to African Oil Production

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The project is designed as a second follow-up to the project Significations of oil and social change in Niger and Chad (2011-13 and 2013-2015). It carries the same title and aims at completing, supplementing, and further developing in empirical and theoretical scope the work and results from the first and second project phase. Due to delays in carrying out the second project phase, the DFG has granted our project an extension without additional funds (kostenneutrale Laufzeitverlängerung) until December 2017. Because of that, we only apply for a limited number of months of personnel costs / scholarships for our German and African staff. We do not apply for additional non-personnel-costs, but intend to use the funds still available to us from the second phase. The project team is convinced of the strength of the two previous project applications, in which we proposed to develop a distinctly anthropological perspective on societal transformations in the newly emerged African oil states of Niger and Chad. We maintain our methodological focus on observing the practice of re-ordering and re-spacing in and around the new Chadian and Nigerien oil production and refining sites as well as in the oil states capitals. We also maintain and further refine our theoretical focus on narrations and significations in political and social interaction as well as on material and technological aspects of oil production as they translate into new orders and disorders. Our explicit focus for the third phase is to tie together the strands of research and the data produced so far by conducting internal evaluation workshops, participating in internal PP workshops with other subprojects and carrying out a final conference with our project members, external experts and cooperation partners. While our theoretical focus slightly shifted from significations to technologies in the second project phase, we propose another shift to the question of how narratives and technologies of oil trigger re-negotiations and alterations in the perception of space. This shift will build on the knowledge we have assembled so far and include our newly gathered material concerning orders created by security measures, architecture, financial politics, forms of claim-making and blaming as well as the interaction with new business partners. The goal is to produce at least two contributions to the planned PPs three cluster publications as well as journal articles and a project related edited volume/special issue.