Jordan B. Kinder is Assistant Professor in the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication and holds a PhD in English from the University of Alberta. He grew up in northern British Columbia, Canada where he completed his BA and MA at the University of Northern British Columbia and is a citizen of the Otipemisiwak Métis Government (Métis Nation of Alberta).
Kinder researches and teaches on the cultural politics of energy, media, infrastructure, and environment across the fields of materialist media and communication studies, the energy and environmental humanities, and critical Indigenous studies. He has published articles in journals such as the Canadian Journal of Communication, Journal of Environmental Media, and South Atlantic Quarterly. His first sole-authored book, Petroturfing: Refining Canadian Oil through Social Media (University of Minnesota Press, 2024), critically examines how the pro-oil movement in Canada took shape on social media throughout the 2010s in the setting of a handful of proposed, highly contested oil sands pipeline projects, which won the Canadian Communication Association’s 2025 Emerging Scholar Prize and was a finalist for the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment’s 2025 Ecocritical Book Award. He is currently working on a historical, archive-driven monograph on the media and mediations of the Mackenzie Valley Pipeline proposals and inquiry of the 1970s.
Before joining NYU, Kinder was Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication Studies at Wilfrid Laurier University and a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University’s Mahindra Humanities Center (2022-23) and McGill University’s Department of Art History and Communication Studies (2020-22).