Place as boundary object: the Manitoba Oil Museum

ABSTRACT

The Manitoba Oil Museum and Interpretive Centre (MOMIC) is a collection of people who work and live with oil extraction in the southwestern corner of Manitoba; they have met at annual events, share stories and photos, and induct a major oil contributor into the Manitoba Oil Hall of Fame. At first glance, the Manitoba Oil Museum appears to reify the legitimacy of resource extractive processes and valorize the contributions of key members of Manitoba’s oil industry. However, viewing the museum for the way it is enrolled in the place-making of oil in Manitoba as a boundary object can lead to a different conclusion. An examination of a DVD produced by the museum reveals the ways that boundary work engenders inclusion and exclusion of particular knowledge that operates to condition what is possible within the place-making of oil in Manitoba. This paper suggests paying attention to MOMIC as a place-making boundary object creates opportunities to reveal obscured knowledge-making practices, highlighting inherent critique, but also the limits of critique.

KEYWORDS:

• Place
• critical place inquiry
• boundary objects
• boundary work
• Manitoba Oil Museum
• oil and gas extraction
• fracking‌
• ‌

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 This has been called ontology in practice and is described by Wendy Orlikowski as, “A position of constitutive entanglement”, that,

does not privilege either humans or technology (in one-way interactions), nor does it link them through a form of mutual reciprocation (in two-way interactions). Instead, the social and the material are considered to be inextricably related – there is no social that is not also material, and no material that is not also social. (Orlikowski 2007)

2 As a result of this research project, Wheeler is now (summer/fall 2021) working with the group towards their goal of establishing a virtual museum.

3 We define petroculture as, cultural and daily practices that display our deep entanglement with petroleum (Wilson, Carlson, and Szeman 2017)

4 A battery is the site where the fluid from a well is taken to separate the oil from the other fluids (primarily water but often with other minerals such as salt and the fracking solution included) and from gases like natural gas, or hydrogen sulfide. A battery flare stack is the apparatus at the battery site where the gases are pumped through a filter and then burned off. They locate this stack higher up to also remove the gases farther from the ground so that they may dissipate better.

5 Commonsense here is in relation to Gramscian notions of how practices, in this case toxic waste practices, become acceptable and even seen as “normal” (Butler 1990).

6 There is considerable legislation that has been passed for workplace health and safety pertaining to the presence of H₂S but a recent taskforce for the federal government concluded that there was not enough evidence to designate H₂S as a public safety concern, even while being heavily criticized by scientists and activists for this decision. This decision concludes that workers experience this gas but that people living nearby do not, contrary to mounting evidence of long-term low dose exposure risk for nearby residents (McSheffrey 2017).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada [grant number: 767-2016-2046].

Notes on contributors

Mya J. Wheeler

Mya Wheeler (she/her) is a Ph.D. candidate at the Natural Resources Institute of the University of Manitoba doing social science research regarding oil and gas extraction in Manitoba, Canada.

Jonathan Luedee

Jonathan Luedee (he/him) is a Faculty of Arts (FAS) Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Toronto (Department of History). His research considers the intersecting geographies of migratory animals, resource extraction, and scientific knowledge production in the North American Arctic.