Theresa Atutu MA

PhD candidate

Cohort/Start PhD: 2022-2023

The Historical Ecology of Oil management in Nigeria. A Discourse Analysis on the Petroleum Industry in the Niger Delta.

Overarching project: AFREXTRACT

Supervisor(s): Dr Iva Peša, Prof. dr Clemens Six.

My research project is on the historical ecology of oil management in the Niger Delta, Nigeria. It will be operationalised by using Foucault’s Governance theory and Callon et al’s Actor-network theory as frameworks to identify, analyse and conceptualise the existing relationships in the environmental history of the Niger Delta, discourse analysis as an interdisciplinary methodology to conclude a multi-layered understanding of the environmental history of resources extraction, and historical ecology to understand and query the oil industry to interpret the results found. The project will use oral history, archives, popular literature (novels and poems), and songs to examine lived experiences of environmental transformation caused by oil extraction. This project aims to historicise these environmental conflicts and to understand why people reacted differently to environmental change.