Hannah Tollefson

Hannah (she/her) is media and environmental studies scholar who works on questions of ecology, economy, and infrastructure. She studies how territory is technically mediated; the role of infrastructure in shaping relationships of place and scale; and the politics of energy transition. 

Contact: hannah.tollefson@mail.mcgill.ca or hannahtollefson@gmail.com

Projects   

"To Tidewater: Logistics, Labour and Conservation in the Salish Sea" is a study of how the coastlines and waterways of the Staľəw estuary and the Salish Sea, which host the terminals and shipping lanes that comprise the Port of Vancouver, have been constructed and maintained as logistics space. Ninety percent of global commodities move through maritime space, putting immense political and environmental pressure on oceans and coastal port spaces. This project traces the role of scientific and technical mediation in the politics of logistics by studying key sites of environmental and supply chain management. These include environmental assessments, vessel optimization and standardization efforts, habitat offsetting, and remediation, and distributed sensing and monitoring systems. Analyzing these practices and infrastructures, the project seeks to understand the mutual relationships between settler colonial governance, environmental management, logistical infrastructures, and supply chain capitalism. The project is supported by the Joseph Armand Bombardier CGS Scholarship and the Wolfe Graduate Fellowship.

Lines, Mines, and Ports: The Infrastructural Politics of Energy, Extraction, and Logistics in Northwest BC (MA Thesis: McGill University, completed 2018) examined two large-scale energy and logistics projects in northwest British Columbia: the Northwest Transmission Line and the Stewart World Port. Drawing on environmental assessments, government reports, engineering papers, journalism, film, photographs, maps, and other materials, the thesis considered how such infrastructures shape the material geographies of mineral extraction in the region by tracing their history, continuity, and contemporary forms. The project was supported by a Joseph-Armand Bombardier CGS Master's Scholarship. 

Energy Media: The Politics of Solid-Phase Bitumen is a research project examining the political, economic and environmental implications of emerging formats of for the production and transportation of solid-phase bitumen. Specifically, it will explore solid-phase bitumen as a case in which politics – resource politics, energy politics, environmental politics – are mediated by materials and the infrastructures that facilitate their extraction, storage and transportation. (PI: Darin Barney) 

"No Heavenly Body" is an ongoing project I've been working on in collaboration with documentary filmmaker Sara Wylie. It is a three-channel video installation that explores the social, cultural, and environmental implication of the proliferation of low earth orbiting satellites in the sky, light pollution from which astronomers warn will bring an end to earth bound astronomy and the visibility of stars from Earth. The piece weaves together a series of (dis)connected stories of extraterrestrial exploration and corporate space cowboys, colonial land practices and logistics, and the enduring wonder and cosmological disconnection. Research for this work was funded by a Canada Council Research and Creation grant.

Publications 

Peer-Reviewed Journal Articles

Tollefson, H. (2021). Staking a Claim: Mineral Mining, Prospecting Logics, and Settler Infrastructures. Canadian Journal of Communication, 46(2), 177-199.   

Couture, S., Sterne, J., Sawhney, M., Roburn, S., Kelleher Stuhl, A., Köstem, B., Tollefson, H., Jordan, R., Morrison, L., Rogers, A., & Nardone, M. (2020). Sensate Sovereignty: A Dialogue on Dylan Robinson’s Hungry Listening. Amodern. https://amodern.net/article/sensate-sovereignty/     

Tollefson, H., & Barney, D. (2019). More Liquid than Liquid: Solid-Phase Bitumen and Its Forms. Grey Room, 77, 38–57.   

Chapters in Edited Anthologies

Kinder, J., Köstem, B., Tollefson, H., & Vemuri, A. (2023). Beyond Abundance: Infrastructure and Flow at the Beauharnois Generating Station. In E. Roehl, A. Pasek, & C. Wellum (Eds.), Energy in/out of Place. University of West Virginia Press.  

Multi-authored book

FieldARTS. (2023). Field Docket. F. Carter & J. Diamanti (Eds.) Sonic Acts.  

After Oil Collective. (2022). Solarities: Seeking Energy Justice. A. Vemuri & D. Barney (Eds.) University of Minnesota Press. https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/solarities

Forthcoming publications 

Vemuri, A., Tollefson, H. (In press). Respiration. In C. Howe, J. Diamanti, & A. Moore (Eds.), Solarities: Inflections and Refractions. Punctum Press. 

Tollefson, H. (Accepted without revisions). Tarred Feathers: Deterrent Media and Sound Management. In J. Berland & T. Lamarre (Eds.), Digital Animalities: Media Activation of Nonhuman Life in the Age of Risk. University of Minnesota Press. 

*Feel free to reach out via email for pdf copies.

Activity 

Anti-Colonial Environmental Studies Reading Group (ACES) is a reading group that I have been co-organizing with Ayesha Vemuri since 2018. The group includes graduate students, post-docs, and professors and acts as a space for discussion of texts relating to the environmental humanities from explicitly anti-colonial perspectives drawing on Indigenous and post-colonial writers and thinkers both scholarly and literary.