Exhausting rhythms: the intimate geopolitics of resource extraction

Abstract

This article develops cultural geographical understandings of exhaustion through an exploration of the bodily pressures induced by mobile working practices. Through analysis of semi-structured interviews with resource sector workers in Australia who work away from home for periods of time as well as ‘left behind’ partners, we argue that exhaustion is a collective ‘structure of feeling’, but one that is differently experienced by mobile workers and partners. Tracing the diverse rhythms of compression and decompression that are experienced by workers and partners both at home and away, our focus on temporality connects the exhaustions experienced at resource extraction sites with exhaustions experienced in the home. By providing an important temporal focus to debates on intimacy-geopolitics, we explain how rhythms instigated by resource work are complicit in generating structures of feeling that compromise wellbeing within the home. We conclude that the exhausted bodies of mobile worker households are an obscured casualty of our current resource-intensive lives.