SBE Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant - Crude Fictions: Oil and the Making of Modularity in Equatorial Guinea

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Graduate student Hannah Appel, supervised by Dr. James Ferguson, will undertake research on the standardization process by which new oil exporting countries become socially, politically, and economically like other oil-exporting states. The term modularity refers to this process: the social, political, and economic effort to create forms of equivalence and commensurability specific to oil-exporting states. She will carry out her research in the central African state of Equatorial Guinea, which has seen 10 billion dollars in petroleum-related investment over the last six years, and is now Africa's third largest oil producer. The researcher will investigate standardization in three different domains: the use of standard oil technologies; the effects of petroleum income on local politics; and the relationships between the host and investor countries and corporations. She will conduct eighteen months of fieldwork in Equatorial Guinea. Her mixed-methods approach with include an institutional ethnography of an American petroleum corporation operating in Equatorial Guinea; a survey of 300 people connected to the industry; socio-spatial mappings; and in-depth interviews. While others have observed the existence of modularity, this study will be one of the first to examine the processes and activities by it is achieved.Petroleum is widely understood to be the most lucrative and important industry in the world, inseparable from the largest forms of transnational capital. In 2006, the United States imported more oil from Africa--a continent not often considered central to global capital flows--than it did from the Middle East. Based on research in the geographic core of this phenomenon, this project aims to contribute to research on extractive industries, development studies, ethnography of economic transformation, and debates on material and ideological standardization in global processes. The research also will contribute significantly to the education of a social scientist.