Ecologies of Affect: Placing Nostalgia, Desire, and Hope

12. The Spatial Distribution of Hope In and Beyond Fort McMurray

The Spatial Distribution of Hope In and Beyond Fort McMurray SARA DOROW GOZE DOGU [O]nce one has hope within one’s field of vision, one discovers the astounding degree to which the constellations of feelings, discourses and practices articulated to hope permeate social life. (Hage 2003, 9) Introduction Fort McMurray, Alberta, has been hailed as a “land of hope” for workers and their families, for the Canadian national economy, and even for a carbon -based global energy system. This town-cum-city serves as staging area for the development of the Athabasca oil sands, a deposit of bitumen covering an area of northeast Alberta larger than the province of New Brunswick (or Florida) and composing the second-largest known oil reserve on the planet. It is unconventional oil, in that it must be mined from the surface or underground pockets and then separated from a viscous combination of sand, oil, and water; the process requires much higher levels of financial and human resources than does the production of conventional oil. In the early years of the twenty-first century, as the right alchemy of financing, technology, government policy, and higher oil prices allowed the extraction of bitumen to take off, the population of Fort McMurray doubled to more than 70,000 in just eight years. The professionals, service sector workers, and especially trades people who migrated (and were often encouraged to migrate) from all over Canada and other parts of the globe inhabit spaces with and beside people who have called Fort McMurray home for decades or even generations. But “land of hope” means different things to these people, and 271 12 272 HOPE as we argue in this chapter, these differences are revealed at the juncture of identity and place—in the social relations of co-presence (Massey 1994) among professionals and industrial workers, long-term and short-term residents. Hage (2003) argues that in an era of flexible capital accumulation and reduced state welfare provision, hope is not only unevenly distributed across the social spectrum, but also increasingly scarce. Our exploration of Fort McMurray utilizes Hage’s framework but shifts toward conceptualizing the distribution of hope as a matter of social relations to, in, and across space. Hage has said that the kinds of attachments people have to place (mostly synonymous with the nation in the case of his work) are contingent on a society’s ability to distribute hope evenly, and this ability is increasingly compromised. While in basic agreement with Hage’s argument, we fear his conceptualization of hope may inadvertently fix place and/or conceive of space as a series of “levels” from local to global. Doreen Massey’s impressive body of work has asserted first, that both places and identities vary, and thus vary in relation to each other; and second, that any “place” (such as Fort McMurray) is “constructed out of a particular constellation of [globalized ] social relations, meeting and weaving together at a particular locus” (Massey 1994, 7). In other words, the “big picture” of social and market relations (such as that of the oil sands industry) is in fact local, even as “local” is itself many things, constructed out of “the intersections and interactions of concrete social relations and social processes in a situation of co-presence” (138). In this chapter we explore several co-present forms of “local consciousness ” (perceptions of identities and belonging in and through place) among different groups of people in Fort McMurray, with the aim of reconceptualizing hope in terms of spatialized social relations. In that sense, through Massey’s insights, we are expanding on Hage’s framework. Analyzing the complex and uneven “relations of co-presence” in the particular context of Fort McMurray provides a unique lens on the social distribution of hope as a spatialized process; it alerts us to the differential availability and experience of hope as a matter of relations in and across places. This framework informs our analysis of more than fifty interviews we conducted with a broad cross-section of people living and/or working in the Fort McMurray area; each interviewee was also asked to draw a sketch map of “your Fort McMurray.” Participants included welders and truck drivers from out of province living in work camps, immigrants with engineering degrees recruited to work for the oil companies for several years, thirty-year residents teaching nursing or education in the local college, Aboriginal people born and...