Owen Harrington

I’m a PhD candidate here in the Geography department, specializing in energy geography, political ecology, critical resource geographies, and financial geography, interested in waste, extraction, STS, and critical theory. My dissertation research is focused on the articulation of new processes and forms of extraction associated with the globalization and financialization of the energy and mining sectors with the apparent exigency of increasing the mining of various minerals needed for “green energy technologies.” My inquiry is more specifically focused on the forms of politics, labor, expertise, and technology this conjuncture empowers and causes to proliferate. My case study is focused on the efforts to establish a ‘critical minerals’ economy in Pennsylvania with coal by-products and wastes as its primary feedstocks. My masters research examined environmental knowledge production about ‘Fracking’ in Western PA.  

Prior to studying at Penn State, I completed my B.A. at Oberlin College with a major in mathematics and a pair of minors in French and comparative literature. I then spent two years teaching high school calculus in Maine. I also like fly fishing.