Analyze

This article is discussing how the massive bust after the pandemic is reshaping people’s perception of the viability of working in the fossil fuel sector. Many young, educated workers (even those in petroleum engineering) in the energy sector are preferring the steady work of renewables over the boom and busts of the oil economy.

Normally, 80 to 90 percent of petroleum engineering graduates have job offers by their final semester, but neither he nor the majority of his classmates had jobs lined up, he said. Although he has begun to see petroleum engineering jobs posted again, he hasn’t had any luck. He plans to hone his digital skills and has started looking at engineering jobs with pipeline companies as an alternative.

“I always joked that I would be graduating in a downturn, but I never in my wildest dreams thought it would be this bad,” Mangum said. “It’s only been about a month since I’ve graduated so I’m not in desperate straits yet, but I can definitely feel the pressure mounting to find employment of some kind.”

In our group we had Dr. Jessica Sewell come speak to us a little while ago about her book Women and the Everyday City and we landed on the topic of “imaginaries of space” for a long time. And the visual politics of space- so how do we notice things? What do we notice? What seems out of place or in place. Thinking about how imaginaries make certain presences completely invisible (thinking here about gendered labor, black labor, and more). And how powerful imaginaries are, how they intersect with our construction of language. But also how resistance can work with these imaginaries.. thinking about women’s sort of take over of dept stores during the suffrage movement as an extension of their private space, a space for organizing. This is long winded way of trying to think through COVID-19 national models in the context of national imaginaries. What has been puzzling me is so many Americans’ response to the Swedish model of governing in Covid and how imaginaries of Sweden have been warped in such a way that there is a complete erasure of how xenophobic policies have gained traction in Sweden in recent years.