Nélia Dias, Rodney Harrison, Dolly Jørgensen, Gertjan Plets, and Colin Sterling introduce Petroculture’s Intersections with The Cultural Heritage (PITCH) sector in the context of green transitions, a new Horizon Europe and UK Research and Innovation funded research project that brings together academic and cultural sector partners in six countries. The project aims to spur on the processes by which humanities and arts scholarship and public interventions can strengthen citizen engagement with the constantly changing nature of cultural heritage and its relationship to past and present petrocultures to lay the groundwork for rapid, society-wide European green transitions away from a reliance on fossil fuels.
In the second of a two-part series on Racial Capital by emerging researchers, Shouhei Tanaka (Postdoctoral Scholar, University of Southern California) explores how Chickasaw writer Linda Hogan’s novel Solar Storms (1995) fictionalizes the James Bay Cree hydroelectric conflict and places it in the longer histories of North American settler colonialism. For Tanaka, energy modernity is a history of empire and the future of energy must necessarily be a future of decolonization.
In the first of a two-part series on Racial Capital by emerging researchers, Marah Nagelhout (PhD candidate, Brown University) traces the convergence of ecological remediation and the carceral logic of reform in the "toxic prisons" built on or near environmental sacrifice zones around the United States. For Nagelhout, "these volatile containment infrastructures are expressions of a primary contradiction of capitalism that arises from the structural necessitation of waste in the value form of capital itself."
Gianfranco Selgas reports on the recent workshop "Archives of the Planetary Mine: Culture, Nature Extraction, and Energy across the Americas" at Nordic Institute of Latin American Studies, Stockholm University, Sweden.
The Petrocultures Research Group's After Oil Collective recently began its After Oil 3 (AOS 3) project. One result of the first AOS 3 meeting is a six-episode podcast series called Volatile Trajectories, which has just been released online and as part of the Environmental Humanities Month 2022 Program. The podcast episodes were written and recorded over a day and a half at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity in October 2022. They feature leading and emerging energy humanities researchers in conversation about how we move beyond fossil fuels and climate crisis.
Climate fiction stories, sometimes known as "cli-fi", have captured the imagination of writers and their readers. But it isn't yet clear if reading dramatic narratives about climate change can or will translate into action. Amidst a significant push for new narratives to shift climate anxiety into action, researcher Misty Matthews-Roper has turned to book clubs to understand the social power of reading cli-fi. She reports on her preliminary findings about how social reading can create meaningful conversations about how to live and respond to the ongoing climate crisis.
Adam Carlson teases out how the framing of resource development in Canada often supports authoritarian resource rhetoric and policies. The way we talk about "Canadian oil", it turns out, is deeply political and cannot be separated from ongoing histories of resource extraction and dispossession.
The Centre for Energy Ethics (CEE) at the University of St. Andrews is a new and dynamic hub for interdisciplinary research and discussion about energy. The CEE's founding director, social anthropologist Dr. Mette High, explains the genesis of the centre and the "analytical open-mindedness" that informs its approach to changing how we talk about energy.
What does religion have to do with climate change? For writer and artist Darren Fleet, the wildfires raging across Western Canada evoke the shared vocabulary of religion and climate change politics, and the urgent need to think seriously about the 'spiritual work' of energy transition and energy justice.
Amid growing calls for a worldwide energy transition, Emily Eaton, Andrew Stevens, and Sean Tucker highlight the possibility of an unjust transition, particularly for workers. Their research on the struggle of oil refinery workers in Regina, Saskatchewan, demonstrates that a just transition will only happen if people fight for it.
Rural communities are often hit hard by climate change but face significant barriers in mitigating its effects. Enock Mac'Ouma describes a project of the UNESCO Chair on Community Radio for Agricultural Education at Rongo University, Kenya, which uses community radio to accelerate rural education and technology transfer in a particularly vulnerable region.
Researcher Sydney Hart explains his web-based project to scrutinize the flight networks that support the operations of some of the world's largest gold mining companies. Rather than "flight shaming" individuals, "Mining Maps" shines a light on corporate responsibility for climate change.
As our society transitions to new forms of energy, our social and cultural stories will also change. Derek Gladwin explores how the energy humanities provide a useful framework for understanding and speaking about our individual and collective energy stories.
Despite a recent surge in youth climate activism around the world, climate-related topics remain marginal in formal education in many countries. A team of researchers created the International Youth Deliberation on Energy Futures to fill the gap. Lynette Shultz and Carrie Karsgaard explain what they were up to, and how the students responded.
The COVID-19 pandemic has grounded thousands of would-be travellers and forced the organizers of large conferences to rethink how to share knowledge and build professional networks. Energy Humanities researchers Anne Pasek, Emily Roehl, and Caleb Wellum argue that this turn of events is an opportunity to create more sustainable and equitable forms of knowledge exchange. In this white paper, they offer practical advice for conference organizers looking to experiment with low carbon e-conferencing.
