Helios 3: Rebecca Sharp's Rough Currency

12 Min Read

August 23, 2021

Helios is an EH interview series about new research in the energy humanities and the creative processes that bring it to life.

Our third installment features Scottish poet and playwright Rebecca Sharp, whose interdisciplinary work explores ideas of landscape and place across artforms. In her new poetry pamphlet, Rough Currency, Sharp plumbs our personal and collective entanglements with fossil fuels with an eye for the mythic and the magical. A selection of her work is featured in The Art of Energy exhibition at the Centre for Energy Ethics, where it won second prize in the inaugural Art of Energy Award.

EH editors Imre Szeman and Caleb Wellum sat down with Rebecca over Zoom on June 25 to talk about her poetic process during a pandemic, why she wanted to write about oil, and how poetry can help us to see the world differently so that we might change it.

Click the download link below to read the full interview.

Download the interview
Thank you! Your submission has been received!
Oops! Something went wrong while submitting the form.

Read More

June 6, 2025

David Pereplyotchik

A recent spate of climate protests and mass-movement civil disobedience events has reinvigorated mainstream discussions of the ethics of civil disobedience, direct action, and various forms of ecosabotage. In this paper, I examine the present-day case for both non-violent civil disobedience and more extreme forms of "direct action" in response to the global climate emergency. In particular, I explore how the framework of virtue ethics can be applied in this context, yielding conclusions that will be disappointing to prospective eco-saboteurs but encouraging to those committed to non-violent resistance.

Read
May 16, 2023

Sarah Marie Wiebe

In this Author's Note, political scientist Sarah Marie Wiebe outlines the stories, concerns, and methods animating her new book, "Life Against States of Emergency: Revitalizing Treaty Relations from Attawapiskat."

Read
all articles