Abstract
ABSTRACT Drawing on ethnographic research in two locations facing the prospect of shale gas exploration in Poland and the UK, I analyse how the future can be simultaneously predetermined and undetermined. Local actors handle this complex experience by relating to fracking infrastructures, fixing the materialities of shale gas as well as cultivating an air of conspiracy around the intricacies of gas developments. I focus on the everyday to broaden the scope of recent scholarly writing on resource indeterminacy that explores how corporate strategies create the futures of resource extraction. The contradictory temporalities that these strategies generate have to be reconciled at the sites of extraction. I call for opening our theorisations up to how resource indeterminacy and assertions of predetermined futures are mediated in the everyday contexts of noncorporate actors. By considering these daily forms of engagement with resource exploration, we gain a more realistic perspective on the potentialities of extraction.
Highlights
On the morning of 3 June 2013, a few men from a local building company arrive at an overgrown piece of land leased by Chevron in Żurawlów – a small village in Southeast Poland where prospecting for shale gas exploration is to take place
As various actors try to reconcile the clashing temporary rhythms, they engage in everyday mediations of the future through the ways in which they relate to fracking infrastructures, fix the unruly materialities of shale gas and create conspiracy theories
Far from the exclusive domain of discourses and high politics, a predetermined hydrocarbon future depends on everyday modes of social, material and individual time; it is sustained through ordinary actions of diverse actors who manage the contradictory and anticipatory rhythms generated by shale gas developments (Szolucha 2018)
Summary
On the morning of 3 June 2013, a few men from a local building company arrive at an overgrown piece of land leased by Chevron in Żurawlów – a small village in Southeast Poland where prospecting for shale gas exploration is to take place. This article analyses elements of the everyday of shale gas developments in Poland and the United Kingdom to explore how time and future are mediated at the sites of resource exploration activities to reconcile the contradictory temporalities of extraction.
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