| This is a cultural study of the Exxon Valdez oil spill. It addresses the questions of how the oil spill was shaped by the context of forces that produced it, and how it, in turn, reshaped that context. The study uses historical, critical, and interpretive methods to contextualize the spill and trace its discursive construction across a number of sites of knowledge production. The study finds that the discourses of news, law, and politics produced knowledge of the spill deeply implicated in the operations of social power around it. Mass and legally mediated representations of the spill tended to discourage critical insight into its root causes, and to divert critical attention to red herrings such as human error, alcohol, and oil spill cleanup operations.; The dissertation is also about the problem of studying an environmental issue from a cultural studies perspective. To date, the engagements between cultural studies and environmental studies has been fraught with tensions. These tensions have been most manifest in cultural studies' preoccupation with deconstructing claims to nature and its tendency to emphasize human politics at the expense of eco-politics.; Using articulation theory, it moves beyond the quagmire of the great wilderness debate, and charts a middle ground between, on the one hand, the overly optimistic and non-deterministic celebration of “wild nature” as an unproblematic solution to complex social and ecological problems, and, on the other hand, the overly pessimistic and deterministic critique of “wild nature” as guaranteed ideology, an always already coopted term which indirectly supports the very things it ostensibly resists. This study looks at how those articulations were forged in the context of the struggle against oil pollution in Alaska, and attempts to evaluate their effects, maintaining critical understandings of nature and wilderness without rejecting those terms out of hand, or out of the context of the specific social and ecological struggles in which they were deployed. |
