Dakota Raynes

co-author of "Fractured Communities: Risk, Impacts, and Protest Against Hydraulic Fracking in U.S. Shale Regions"

February 14, 2018

Dakota is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Sociology at Oklahoma State University. His research focuses on examination of social problems, issues of inequality and social movements that emerge to demand and work toward a more just and equitable society. Dakota’s dissertation, “They Underestimate the Persistence of Our Red Dirt Resistance: Community Responses to Technological Risks in Oklahoma’s Oil and Gas Plays,” utilizes four years of ethnographic participatory action research, news media, in-depth interviews and a wide variety of stakeholder-produced documents to examine local anti-fracking social movements and counter-movements.

Preliminary findings illustrate a pattern of denial, disinformation, and delay, implemented by state officials, regulatory agencies and the oil and gas industry that resulted in a normative culture of recreancy, which inhibits protection of residents’ land, lives, livelihoods, and the broader natural environment. Additionally, Dakota found that emotional attachments to place-based identities can catalyze diverse types of pro-social movement collective action, even when communities are aware of the regulatory and legislative challenges they face in “the state that oil and gas built.”

Moving forward, Dakota will continue studying interconnections between symbolic power and violence; embodied experiences of inequality; emancipatory/liberationist practices; movement and counter-movement dynamics; and the social construction of knowledge.

While environmental disputes and conflicts over fossil fuel extraction have grown in recent years, few issues have been as contentious in the twenty-first century as those surrounding the impacts of unconventional natural gas and oil development using hydraulic drilling and fracturing techniques - more commonly known as fracking - on local communities. In "Fractured Communities", Anthony E. Ladd and other leading environmental sociologists present a set of crucial case studies analyzing the differential risk perceptions, socio-environmental impacts and mobilization of citizen protest, or quiescence, surrounding unconventional energy development and hydraulic fracking in a number of key U.S. shale regions.

"Fractured Communities" reveals how this contested terrain is expanding, pushing the issue of fracking into the mainstream of the American political arena. Notably, it is the first empirically based anthology to foreground comprehensive social science analyses, rather than purely economic or technical analyses, of this particular technological innovation and the effects on communities in which it is practiced.

URL: https://library.okstate.edu/news/celebratingbooks/2018-honorees/dakota-raynes

Last Updated: 14 February 2018