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Abstract
This dissertation examines the politics of environmental knowledge at the intersection of shale gas development and agricultural production in the Marcellus Shale region. The lack of a comprehensive federal shale gas development policy has created a heterogeneous landscape of state regulations, with neighboring states such as New York and Pennsylvania adopting opposing regulatory approaches: New York has banned hydraulic fracturing, while Pennsylvania has drilled over 11,000 wells over a ten-year period. Using this region as a timely and compelling case study, this dissertation examines the politics of contestation among farmer-landowners, agricultural researchers, and Cooperative Extension educators seeking to navigate the Marcellus shale gas boom. Conceptually, I employ environmentality frameworks to navigate the shifting, uneven, and contextually contingent networks of environmental knowledges, discourses, institutions, and politics that co-produce farmer-landowners as shale gas subjects. However, pervasive pro/anti-drilling and economy/environment dichotomies frame public debate over shale gas development, obscuring the complex interactions of power and knowledge that produce partial subject positions with myriad orientations towards hydraulic fracturing. I argue that farmer-landowners who own their subsurface mineral rights are situated at the confluence of multiple, competing arts of governance that seek to shape their behavior, resulting in incomplete, precarious, and contradictory multi-subjectivities.