Biography

Jordan B. Kinder is a media studies and environmental humanities scholar from what is now called northern British Columbia. He is a citizen of the Métis Nation of Alberta, and is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University. He holds a PhD in English and Film Studies from the University of Alberta where he wrote a dissertation that studies the cultural politics of energy, media, infrastructure, and environment through a case study of the burgeoning pro-oil movement in Canada. His new research project, Northern Infratectures, Northern Relations: Mediating the Unbuilt Mackenzie Valley Pipeline, explores the media and mediations of the unbuilt Mackenzie Valley Pipeline, including the forgotten role of the architecture, planning, and design firm Van Ginkel Associates in Canadian Arctic Gas Pipeline Limited’s proposal.

His first sole-authored book, Petroturfing: Refining Canadian Oil through Social Media, was published in June 2024 by the University of Minnesota Press, won the 2025 Canadian Communication Association’s Early Career Book Prize and was shortlisted for the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment’s 2025 Ecocritical Book Award. Other work of his can be found in South Atlantic Quarterly, the Canadian Journal of Communication, Energy Culture: Art and Theory on Oil and Beyond (West Virginia UP), The Bloomsbury Companion to Marx (Bloomsbury Academic), Socialism and Democracy, Mediations, and elsewhere.

He currently lives and works in New York City/Lenapehoking, the ancestral lands of the Lenape peoples.