Laura Pannekoek

Laura Pannekoek (she/her) is a PhD student in Communications at Concordia University, supervised by Dr. Peter C. van Wyck. Laura recently completed an MA in Literary and Cultural Analysis at the University of Amsterdam with a thesis that traced a geologic index in cultural production and energy policy. Her doctoral dissertation project focuses on geoscientific technology and infrastructure at sites of resource extraction. She is a member of the Feminist Media Studio at Concordia and research assistant for the SSHRC-funded project "Canada's Waste Future"

Contact: laura.pannekoek@gmail.com 

 
Projects 

Geosocial Futures: Infrastructure at the Geosphere (doctoral dissertation; ongoing)  

This dissertation project asks how the technoscientific mediation of the geosphere unfolds institutionally, economically, and ecologically. By investigating geoscientific infrastructure at sites of extraction and exploration in the Arctic and Chile, this study tracks how these knowledge economies inform a changing geological index to social life. This project follows the dispersion of this geological index both within these local geographies and on a planetary scale as the overlapping crises of climate and capital unfold.  

Geologic Media: Signs, Sediments, and the Imagination of a Volatile Planet (MA thesis; University of Amsterdam, completed 2019)  

This project identified and traced an emerging geological index in cultural production and energy policy. Geology, both as a material category and epistemic mode appears as a stabilizer for planetary volatility. This geologically inflected environmental discourse emerges across polarised theoretical and political spaces such as pro-nuclear vs. anti-nuclear energy, the urban and the rural, and discursive patterns and material processes.  

Publications 

"The Nuclear Mundane: Geology and the Unthinkable." Energy Humanities and Energy Transition: Current State and Future Directions. edited by Matuś Mišik and Nada Kudjunžić. Springer. (In press, 2019.) 

"Nuclear Media from Signs to Sediment." Kunstlicht. vol 39. no. 3. Special issue on 'Nuclear Aesthetics.' February 2019.  

 Activity  

Extraction/extractivism Reading Group – a reading group that meets online weekly to discuss recent scholarship on extraction and/or extractivism. The group consists of some Grierson members and friends at universities in Montreal and Amsterdam.  

Anti-Colonial Environmental Studies reading group (ACES) - a reading group consisting of Grierson members that meets regularly to discuss scholarship and literary and cultural work relating to the intersection between anti-colonial and environmental studies.