[Commlist] Call for Proposals for Online Symposium: Crude Representations: BP and the Cultural Imagination of Oil

Call for Proposals for Online Symposium: Crude Representations: BP and 
the Cultural Imagination of Oil
Online Symposium Friday 24th January 2025
Keynote Speaker: Mona Damluji, Assistant Professor of Film & Media 
Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara

Oil is a cultural as well as material product. It is now pervasive in 
every aspect of modern life: transport, energy, communications and 
media, pharmaceuticals, farming, food ingredients and packaging, homes. 
As many scholars in the energy and environmental humanities have 
demonstrated, to understand our current dependence on oil and enact 
decarbonisation we need to contend with its cultural dimensions.
Within the history of oil production, BP holds an important position as 
one of the largest and longest running oil companies. Crude 
Representations is a one-day symposium that looks to engage with the 
cultural history of the company, bringing to light the multifaceted ways 
in which artists, film-makers, authors, curators, performers, and other 
cultural figures have responded to, critically interrogated, and 
represented BP. The symposium aims to examine the rich, surprising, and 
troubling history of cultural representations of BP and its activities 
in extracting, refining, and selling oil and its derivatives. It will 
explore how cultural figures from the early twentieth century to the 
present have devised new and innovative modes of representation to 
alternately facilitate, question, and resist BP’s history and operations 
across the globe. The event will also examine and reassess BP’s role as 
a patron and sponsor of the arts, and as a company producing its own 
cultural works in the form of communications using myriad media for the 
purposes of science, engineering, education and training, advertising 
and PR, investor relations, and political influence. In so doing, we 
hope to deepen the understanding of the cultural history of petroleum 
and the ongoing legacies shaping the present moment of energy transition.

BP (including its antecedents (Anglo-Persian Oil Company (1909-1935); 
Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (until 1954), British Petroleum (until 2001), 
as well as subsidiaries) is one of the longest running oil 
“supermajors”. Established in 1909 to exploit an oil concession in Iran, 
in 1914 the British government took a controlling stake in the company 
and the British navy became its largest customer, initiating a long 
entanglement with the British Empire and states politics. The 
nationalisation of the oil industry in Iran in 1951, and subsequent 
US/UK backed coup in 1953, provoked a diversification and restructuring 
of its activities. During this period, BP expanded its fields of 
operation to Africa and North America, while also establishing itself as 
a major contender within North Sea oil extraction. Its privatisation 
after 1979, and involvement in numerous mergers and acquisitions, saw it 
transform into the present day diverse multinational company, with 
annual profits of $13.8bn (£11bn) in 2023. At the same time that it 
accrued massive profits, the company was involved in a number of 
environmental catastrophes, including the Torrey Canyon spill in 1967 
and the Deepwater Horizon spill in 2010, while also facing criticism 
over employment and working conditions, human rights violations, 
political influence, and market manipulation.

This symposium is multi-disciplinary, inviting contributions from across 
all academic disciplines as well as other arts and cultural 
institutions. It seeks to examine cultural and artistic forms including: 
film, television, drama and other performance forms, poetry, novels and 
other prose forms, photography, painting and other fine arts, sculpture 
and installation art, architecture, music, graphic design and other 
visual arts, sports, video games, digital art, and new media.
This symposium will also seek to be critical and self-reflective about 
the topic and our approach to it. What are the benefits and challenges 
of making a single oil company the primary organising principle of 
research, rather than other disciplinary, media, or theoretical norms? 
How can we ensure our work does not replicate the unjust and inequitable 
basis of extractivism, and instead provides a diverse and inclusive 
space for new ways of thinking about oil? How can our historical inquiry 
inform and contribute to present day imperatives for sustainability and 
energy transition?

We invite proposals on the topic of the multi-dimensional relationship 
between the arts and BP.
Potential topics could include (but are not limited to):
•	Historical changes in the representation and cultural outputs of BP • 
Indigenous, local, national, and cross-cultural artistic responses to 
BP’s operations
•	Artistic and cultural movements in countries and regions with dominant 
BP involvement •	Literary works and other narrative forms that directly 
or indirectly engage with BP, its activities and sites of extraction and 
production •	Adaptation and translation of works stimulated and 
facilitated by BP’s multinational presence •	BP sponsorship of arts, and 
divestment and boycott campaigns related to it
•	Biographical or professional links between BP and cultural figures
•	Greenwashing, artwashing, and BP’s negotiation of its social license 
to operate
•	The cultural impact of the changing political and economic context of 
BP, from the British Empire to global multinational public limited company
•	Corporate artworks and architecture, investment art and collections
•	BP advertising and public relations
•	Internal BP operational and industrial media productions (scientific, 
educational, investor relations)  •	BP as award winner and awards patron 
(BP film Giuseppina (1959) was winner of the Academy Award for Best 
Documentary (Short Subject); the BP Portrait Award at the National 
Portrait Gallery 1990-2020)
•	Specific events in BP’s corporate history and their representation in 
or impact on arts and culture (the nationalisation of oil production in 
Iran, Torrey Canyon tanker spill, the Iranian Islamic Revolution, the 
discovery of North Sea oil, privatisation, Kirki tanker spill, Deepwater 
Horizon platform spill)  •	Historiography and prior research of BP’s 
involvements in arts and culture •	The art and performance of oil 
activism and protest •	The representation and imagination of energy 
transition
•	The aesthetics of the changing BP logo and branding
•	BP petrol/gas stations and product placement in popular entertainment 
(James Bond (From Russia with Love (1963), Goldfinger (1964), On Her 
Majesty's Secret Service (1969) and A View to a Kill (1985)), The Firm 
(1993), I’m Alan Partridge (1997), The Bourne Identity (2002), Hung 
(2009), Hillbilly Elegy (2020), Slow Horses (2022))
•	Celebrity endorsement and spokespeople (Bob Hoskins, Steven Spielberg, 
Ron Ananian, Terry Thomas, Jimmy Nail, Fenella Fielding, Jack Kelly)
•	Comparative studies of BP’s cultural impact (with other oil companies; 
across different media; historically)
•	BP in education and schools outreach  •	The BP Archive (University of 
Warwick) and BP Video Library, their potentials and restrictions for 
arts research, and alternative archives for BP media
Symposium Organisers: Peter Adkins (University of Edinburgh) and Malcolm 
Cook (University of Southampton)

To propose a contribution please submit an abstract (max 300 words) and 
a short bio (max 100 words) VIA THIS FORM 
https://forms.office.com/e/N7Lbsdg0XV by Monday 23rd September 2024.
As well as conventional 15-minute academic conference papers, we welcome 
proposals for other formats appropriate to the topic and online venue, 
such as practice-based outputs or collaborative presentations and 
performances.
Submissions are welcome from any part of the world and timings of this 
online event will be arranged to be broadly inclusive. Notification of 
acceptance will be sent by Monday 2nd December 2024

If you have any queries regarding this event please contact us via 
email: (m.cook /at/ soton.ac.uk) and (peter.adkins /at/ ed.ac.uk)

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