Dr. Bruce Braun, Univeritys of Minnesota, will speak. The oil boom in North Dakota’s Bakken region captured America’s attention in the years immediately after the 2008 financial crisis and recession, the subject of countless articles, documentaries, art exhibitions and even reality TV shows. Attention focused primarily on the influx of workers, the promise of high wages, and the region’s ‘man camps’, strip clubs and bars. Far less attention was given to another aspect: the rate at which workers were dying on the job was an order of magnitude higher than other U.S. oilfields. In this talk I begin to develop an explanation for the disposability of labor in the Bakken oil play, paying close attention to the geological and economic temporalities of fracking, recent restructuring in the oil industry, and the contradictions of the oil industry’s much vaunted ‘safety culture’.