These video clips provide useful teaching points developed by Debra J. Davidson (Associate Professor, University of Alberta) and Michael Gismondi (Professor, Athabasca University) who explain aspects of their newest book, Challenging Legitimacy at the Precipice of Energy Calamity, one of the few social scientific analyses of the Alberta tar sands.
- Deb - Introduction
Talks about what motivated us to write the book. Short term corporate profits and jobs or long term visions.
- Deb - Lift Our heads Up Out of the Sands
Questions why tar sands and what else?
- Deb - Legitimacy
Alberta tar sands expansions are at the epicenter of a larger global debate about energy, peak oil, and climate change issues.
- Mike - Rescuing Voices
Why are so many good ideas about alternative directions and futures heard, but not publicly deliberated or acted upon?
- Deb- Hearings: A Question of Democracy
The limitations of public hearings.
- Mike – History
Discusses the long history of public financing and state support for the tar sands industry from early 1900s to Suncor in 1967, and how pride in emergence of industry in 1960s is now an obstacle to contemporary change.
- Deb – Bitumen
Struggle over the words tar sands and oil sands. They have become politicized and used to label and reject critics.
- Deb – Discourses
How do pro tar sands narratives and storylines work on belief systems.
- Mike - Language and Power
Language can erase or language can frame and guide our understanding of tar sands issues. Discusses claim by government that tar sands is a knowledge economy.
- Mike- Visualizing the Tar Sands
How photographs and images of tar sands landscapes and tar sands industry become part of civic history and a civic virtue.
- Deb – EROI
Discusses falling Energy Return on Investment in the energy industry in general, and as it applies to tar sands extraction.
- Deb – Keystone
Situated Keystone pipeline as both material and symbolic issue, used to legitimate the global flows of capital, oil and power.
- Deb- Jobs
Discusses pros and cons of jobs created by a boom – bust industry.
- Deb - Imagining Other Futures
Advances the idea of an alternative to the industry.
- Mike - Entrenched Ideas
Talks about how hard it is to change the directions of the oil economy.
- Deb- No Place for Denial
Argues that trends in climate change and uncertainty of declining energy supply are happening, whether we like it or not. Calls for alternatives.
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