Petro-ghosts are meant to signify the way that any mode of resistance to petro-racial capitalist culture must be developed from the "inside," making use of the extant technologies/infrastructures, social structures, discourses, value systems, and political dynamics that have enabled and supported the same racial and fossil-fueled systems that we are seeking to deconstruct and dismantle. As a result, all of our available modes, practices, strategies, etc. of resistance will be "haunted," carrying over remnants of petro-racial infrastructures, habits of thought and experience, relations of power, or modes of relating to others, that will be working against us.
Thus, this analytic is designed to enable researchers to appreciate the different (techno-political, social, epistemic, ethical) forms that such "petro-ghosts" can take, so that we can begin to examine different forms or strategies of working towards environmental justice and tease out any undesired reproductions of petro-racial capitalist culture. The idea here is to infrastructure "transversal" thinking, or thinking across the strengths and weaknesses of multiple and diverse modes of resistance. Because, while any particular mode of resistance to petro-racial capitalism must take shape in reference to (and therefore, at least partially reproduce) that which it resists, the precise dynamics of petro-racial capitalism that each approach upholds or manages to break away from will be different. This means that studying and thinking transversally, at the scale of the relations across these modes of resistance, increases our chances of engendering deeper, more radical breaks from the systems we wish to resist.
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