How do we balance our needs and wants for oil, gas, timber and other resources with the environmental and societal impacts of extractions? How are race, class and gender factors in who benefits or is harmed by extractive practices? And who owns the land, anyway? 

Associate professor Toni Jensen will answer those questions and delve into their local, regional and national importance in her public preview lecture, “Extractions,” which will be offered online via Zoom at 5:15 p.m. on Monday, March 28. 

Jensen’s lecture will preview her Fall 2022 Honors College Signature Seminar, Extractions. Please fill out this online interest form to gain access to the lecture. 

AN IMPORTANT STANCE 

Too often discussions, like the ones Jensen hopes to lead, center the voices of people outside the communities that are impacted. 

“I consider this from a marginalized stance,” said Jensen, who is Métis and spent time at the Dakota Access Pipeline protests at Standing Rock. “Who is impacted when frackers or oil and gas or timber industries decide to come onto reservation land? Or come into a small town? Who’s affected by that, and who has a say? Who gets to say no?” 

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. Students in the class will study the practice and concepts of extraction through political, environmental and socio-economic approaches.

A NARRATIVE LENS 

In addition to examining what happens when extractive industries arrive in a place, Jensen stressed the importance of considering who is harmed after the extractive industries leave. 

“We’ll dive deeply into the lives of those affected by oil and gas extraction, mining, forestry and commercial agriculture and food production,” she said. 

Students in the class will work towards a layered knowledge of these industries and of the people and places most affected by them— including “workers and landowners, corporation executives and pipeline protestors, politicians and climate scientists alike.” 

Though much of the course will examine science and technology and the literal process of fracking, Jensen said that a major part of the course considers the narratives of the people involved. 

“As the processes are developing, what are the stories being told? What is being said in the newspapers, and what are people starting to write in literature? And later, what do film and television have to say?”

Jensen said that she is most interested in community stories, which too often involve crime. 

“For example, when fracking happened in small North Dakota towns, women had to have male colleagues walk them to their cars at night because of incidents of sexual assault,” she said. “All sorts of terrible things were happening. That’s the hidden cost of all of this— what literally happens. You get a new elementary school, you get brand new buildings, you get shiny new infrastructure. But what happens to women who work in the hotels? What happens to women who are night clerks at the grocery stores?”

Jensen will also ask students to consider what happens to the hotels in these towns “once the boom goes bust.”

“When we think about our oil and gas needs, that’s not something we talk about in a lot of depth in this country very often,” she said.

A NECESSARY INTERROGATION 

Students will also “rigorously interrogate” early concepts of land ownership, including the infamous phrase “manifest destiny,” which led to a culture of expansion across the North American continent. 

“It sounds so grand and so glorious and so prosperous. And yet, there are people already living on the land,” Jensen said. “More broadly, this is going to be an investigation of place, and who gets to call it theirs. Any time you’re dealing with extractions and extractive industries, that’s really what’s at issue.”

Despite the fact that the course will be an academic exploration, Jensen said she isn’t trying to separate the emotional aspects. 

“Anytime you’re dealing with people’s land and their families and things that go back through history and generations, there will be emotional ties,” she said. “That’s what makes for an interesting learning environment— not falsely separating our feelings from socio-economic issues. When you make that separation, it becomes a purely academic discourse about other people. I think the harder it is to separate, the better it is for all of us, because then we’re going to live our lives in a more aware way.”  

ABOUT TONI JENSEN 

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. 

Jensen’s 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 U of A and also teaches in the low residency MFA Program at the Institute of American Indian Arts. 

Jensen 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.

SIGNATURE SEMINARS EXPLORE DIVERSE TOPICS 

Extractions is one of three Honors College Signature Seminars scheduled for Fall 2022. Other topics to be explored include Climate Change: A Human History, taught by Ben Vining, an assistant professor of anthropology, and Wrongful Convictions, taught by Tiffany Murphy, associate dean for academic affairs and director of the Criminal Practice Clinic at the U of A School of Law.

Deans of each college may nominate professors to participate in this program, and those who are selected to teach will become Dean’s Fellows in the Honors College. 

Honors students must apply to participate, and those selected will be designated Dean’s Signature Scholars. The course application is posted online on the Signature Seminars web page. The deadline to apply is Thursday, March 31. 

About the Honors College: The University of Arkansas Honors College was established in 2002 and brings together high-achieving undergraduate students and the university’s top professors to share transformative learning experiences. Each year the Honors College awards up to 90 freshman fellowships that provide $72,000 over four years, and more than $1 million in undergraduate research and study abroad grants. The Honors College is nationally recognized for the high caliber of students it admits and graduates. Honors students enjoy small, in-depth classes, and programs are offered in all disciplines, tailored to students’ academic interests, with interdisciplinary collaborations encouraged. 

About the University of Arkansas: As Arkansas' flagship institution, the U of A provides an internationally competitive education in more than 200 academic programs. Founded in 1871, the U of A contributes more than $2.2 billion to Arkansas’ economy through the teaching of new knowledge and skills, entrepreneurship and job development, discovery through research and creative activity while also providing training for professional disciplines. The Carnegie Foundation classifies the U of A among the top 3% of U.S. colleges and universities with the highest level of research activity. U.S. News & World Report ranks the U of A among the top public universities in the nation. See how the U of A works to build a better world at Arkansas Research News.