How to Know about Oil: Energy Epistemologies and Political Futures
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
As a contribution to the growing exploration of oil and energy in the humanities, the author examines what we might learn from three attempts to probe how we know oil—that is, the complex, myriad ways in which we try to name and narrate oil's social significance—in order to understand better the opportunities and challenges of making oil and energy a more conceptually powerful part of our social and cultural understandings. The first of the energy epistemologies the author examines, Timothy Mitchell's Carbon Democracy (2011), reframes the history of left politics in relation to shifts in dominant forms of energy. The second, Edward Burtynsky's photo-series Oil (2011), identifies the deep social significance of oil through experiments in visual form. The third example of knowing oil and energy is the ongoing struggle over the representation of the Alberta oil sands in public and political debate and discussion. The intent of examining these three distinct attempts to know oil as an essential component of social, cultural, and political life is to see what lessons such energy epistemologies might have for a left politics committed to an energy transition that would both ameliorate environmental concerns and enable greater social justice.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it