Hello! My name is John Kendall, and I am currently a Postdoctoral Scholar in Energy Geography at the Pennsylvania State University. I am involved in several research projects related to the natural gas industry in Appalachia, including 1) developing mapping and visualization tools to study the region’s vast infrastructure (wells, pipelines, compressor stations, fractionation and refining facilities), focusing in particular on how cumulative impacts spread unevenly across local communities; 2) adopting systems-based methods developed in political-industrial ecology to study the environmental permitting ‘ecosystem’ governing natural gas extraction and petrochemical development; and 3) examining how the ongoing AI data center boom is both reconfiguring and exacerbating existing legacies of extraction in southwestern Pennsylvania.
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.
In addition to my academic research, I run a relatively active Substack, where I write about a wide variety of topics, from environmental issues in Pennsylvania and the ongoing data center buildout in northern Appalachia to the Marxist critique of science and technology.
Outside of research and writing, I love to hike, camp, and take pictures of nature. You can find some of my pictures here!