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 Communication Studies at Wilfrid Laurier University, as well as a Research Associate with the Mahindra Humanities Center at Harvard 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, Spectres of Settler Infrastructuralisms: Van Ginkel Associates Go North, explores the forgotten role of the architecture, planning, and design firm Van Ginkel Associates in Canadian Arctic Gas Pipeline Limited’s Mackenzie Valley Pipeline Proposal in the 1970s.

His first sole-authored book, Petroturfing: Refining Canadian Oil through Social Media, will be out in June 2024 with the University of Minnesota Press. 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 Tiohtiá:ke (Montréal), which sits on the unceded territory of the Kanien’keha:ka (Mohawk) Nation, and in Waterloo, Ontario (Dish with One Spoon treaty).