Aerial view of Signal Hill’s oil field, from Reservoir Hill. Photo dated: January 21, 1930. Los Angeles Public Library photo collection.

Call for Proposals Petrocultures 2024

With Petrocultures 2024, the biennial conference series comes for the first time to the United States.

We are delighted to have Los Angeles as our host city since LA epitomizes many of the paradoxes and precarities of early 21 st century petroculture. Before it became a media and entertainment capital of the world, Los Angeles was an oil town, with the spectacle of derricks occupying many of its treasured beaches. Over the course of the 20 th century, LA evolved into a quintessential petro-city, famous for its endless freeways, traffic jams, smog, and consumer culture–and less famous for refineries, pipelines, pumpjacks, and container ships that are key features of the land- and waterscape.

The central theme for Petrocultures 2024 LA will be “Oil Cities and Post-Oil Cities.”

We especially invite paper and panel proposals related to the intersection of energy, infrastructure, and urban life, particularly those that seek to draw connections between Global North and South. But as in Petrocultures events past, we also welcome paper and panel proposals on any topic of current interest in energy and environmental humanities. This is your forum: Tell us where you think energy humanities is going from here.

Petrocultures 2024 at The University of Southern California.

The Petrocultures 2024 LA host institution will be the University of Southern California (USC), a leading private research university located in central Los Angeles, only minutes from Downtown LA. The USC Center on Science, Technology and Public Life is our primary on-campus sponsor. In addition to panels, keynote events will take place at USC in collaboration with local partners. Discounted room rates for conference attendees will be available on or near campus. More information will follow on logistics later in the summer. We are putting out this CFP earlier than usual to help enable international and early career scholars to attend. We will review submissions of 100 word abstracts for proposed individual papers and 300 word abstracts for proposed panels on a rolling basis with international applicants prioritized. If you find yourself in need of an invitation letter to support a visa application, please let us know and we will do what we can to help.

Inquiries and Proposals

contactLA@petrocultures2024.com

Please also bookmark this page for more information coming soon!

The Petrocultures Los Angeles organizational team is Dominic Boyer (Rice U), Christina Dunbar-Hester (USC), Devin Griffiths (USC), Andy Lakoff (USC), Colin Maclay (USC), Ciruce Movahedi-Lankarani (USC), and Emily Rose Anderson (USC).