Oil, Orality, and Environment in Transnational Perspective

Speakers: Timothy Cooper and Harley Dyson

This presentation tries to outline the oral history of the oil spill in contemporary history since the Torrey Canyon disaster of 1967. Drawing on both original interviews and archive testimony, it examines the sensory and embodied experience of oil spills as disasters in which increasingly globalised energy systems that supported everyday life in the Global North intersected in contradictory ways with the experience of local environments, and their associated sensory and emotional realms, and the nature of the everyday ‘environmental consciousness’ arising from these encounters.

This is a meeting of the Environment and Climate Change Special Interest Group of the Oral History Society. It is open only to members of the Society. For details of how to join this online meeting please contact Rib Davies.