Hello! My name is John Kendall, and I am currently a Postdoctoral Scholar in Geography at the Pennsylvania State University. I am involved in several research projects related to the natural gas industry in Appalachia, including 1) developing new methods for visualizing its vast infrastructure (wells, pipelines, compressor stations, fractionation and refining facilities) and subsequent entanglements in local ecologies and the livelihoods of local communities, and 2) investigating the way in which the gas industry is adapting itself to the imperatives of ‘energy transition’, must particularly as a provider of the primary input for “blue hydrogen” within the newly proposed “Appalachian Region Clean Hydrogen Hub.”
I am also working on developing my dissertation into a monograph publications. This research focuses on the spatial and financial technologies of the North American oil industry, with a particular focus on the development of the upstream sector along the Gulf Coast. Through archival materials, qualitative fieldwork, and an extensive interdisciplinary study of the secondary literature, I highlight the entanglement and interdependency of oil, finance, and IT, identified in terms of changes to the forms of ‘mediation’ through which oil flows out of and across the earth. Thus, for instance, computers have for decades now helped prospectors find more oil by mediating oilfields as statistical data aggregated into 4D graphical models which are more easily interpreted than, e.g., paper cross sections. In a different way, financial vehicles like oil futures help mediate oil by assigning it value as an asset which can be traded and hence generate revenue prior to its physical extraction. By tracking these transformations, my dissertation troubles distinctions commonly made in political ecological scholarship between an oil sector apparently nearing obsolescence and the more ‘adaptive’ sectors of the economy (e.g., finance and IT) supposed to supersede it.
Outside of academia, I love to hike, camp, and take pictures of nature. You can find some of my pictures here!