UND’s International Studies speaker series continues on March 5

Kortnie Evanson

Document Type

News Article

Publication Date

2-26-2014

Campus Unit

College of Arts & Sciences

Abstract

The next lecture in the University of North Dakota's International Studies speaker series will be given by Sebastian Braun, associate professor of Indian Studies at UND. He will present on his work, titled "Bakkenization: 300 Years of Globalizing Frontiers in North Dakota."

The lecture will be held at 7 p.m., as part of the Backstage Project in the Empire Arts Center. A reception will take place at 6:30 p.m.

Braun's work challenges how we think of development in the Bakken.

The following is Braun's presentation abstract:

While the current events in the Bakken are often portrayed as exceptional, older residents know well that they actually fit into a historic pattern. This presentation will put the Bakken oil boom and its cultural, political, ecological, and social impacts in the global historical contexts of resource extraction frontiers. Bakkenization, like its inspiration, Balkanization, then, describes a broader process, observable in many different regions. It is a frontier process, in which national, international, and increasingly transnational interests support industrial extraction models that bring about a fast globalization of predominantly rural, less populated areas, and withdraw after the resources have been exhausted. The focus of research on "Bakkenization" thus lies on the aftermath of this process. Far from experiencing this for the first time, North Dakota has been one of the hot spots for these kinds of processes for at least three hundred years.

The series is sponsored by the UND College of Arts and Sciences and UND's Department of Modern and Classical Languages and Literatures, UND Department of History, and the UND Department of Political Science and Public Administration.

The remaining schedule for the series follows:

  • April 16: Student Projects.
  • April 30: Ann Reed, "Like Oil and Gender: Work and Play in North Dakota's Oil Patch."

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