Carolina Iglesias Otero

My dissertation research project examines how communities of manual and cognitive workers in Mexico’s oil industry confront, perceive, and anticipate risk and value loss in the context of increasingly volatile climate conditions and infrastructural degradation. I ask: What collective understandings of risk, value creation, and value destruction emerge out of Pemex’s current predicament? What concepts, affects, and temporal dispositions structure the way workers make sense of both the company’s and their own exposure to accidents and losses? I propose that an ethnographic examination of risk monitoring and anticipatory attitudes in the everyday work spaces of the oil industry has much to offer to an inquiry into the relation between fossil capitalism, environmental transformation, and our ways of knowing a changing planet.