What accounts for worker injuries and fatalities in the Bakken oil fields of North Dakota? Should they be viewed as localized phenomena, or are larger socioeconomic processes at work? In his effort to explain oil-boom representations and calamities, Bruce Braun considers and extends Lauren Berlant’s analysis of worker precarity, “crisis ordinariness,” and “slow death.”
Braun and Thomas, eds., Settling the Boom: The Sites and Subjects of Bakken Oil University of Minnesota Press, 2023