A Field Guide to Oil in Santa Barbara: Pedagogy and Practice for Environmental Media Studies

During fall 2018, a multidisciplinary cohort of graduate students participated in a course conducted by professors Javiera Barandiarán and Mona Damluji as part of the Mellon Sawyer Seminar on Energy Justice in Global Perspective at the University of California, Santa Barbara. For their final project, the students worked in groups to conduct place-based, site-specific research on the history and politics of oil in Santa Barbara County. Each group led a tour of a site significant to the history of oil in the region and produced a digital portfolio that contained contemporary and archival images, scans of archival documents, and observational site descriptions. The digital portfolios they compiled were then used to create the multimedia narrative and map A Field Guide to Oil in Santa Barbara. This essay contextualizes the Field Guide within the dominant narratives of oil in the Santa Barbara region, which attempt to contain oil as a naturally occurring substance of the past and not an ongoing part of the area’s role in global systems of oil extraction and capital. This collaboratively written introductory essay is at once a pedagogical reflection and a critical assessment of the field guide as a form of practice in environmental media studies. Over the past decade, field guides of various kinds have emerged across the humanities as hybrid artistic/academic projects, as outcomes of activist scholarship, and as provocations for site-responsive knowledge production. Field guides have also been used by governments and extractive industries to survey, categorize, and lay claim to resources. While acknowledging its experimental nature, this essay explores how the Field Guide is a model for interdisciplinary pedagogy and practice in environmental media studies.