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.
Many people first encounter energy history in museums, where they learn about heroic steam powered engines and fossil-fueled technologies. The history of solar energy technologies, argues Frédéric Caille, is often either forgotten or repressed in these spaces. Such forgetting distorts our understanding of the past and narrows our sense of future possibilities. With his collaborative project to recover, reconstruct, and display forgotten solar water pumps from the 1970s, Caille and his colleagues frame forgotten solar technologies as “cosmograms”: objects which describe the world as it could have been, and could yet become.
In "The Thread of Energy" (OUP, 2021), Martin J. Pasqualetti "treats energy as a social issue with a technical component, rather than the other way around." In this Author's Note, Pasqualetti tells the story of how he came to realize the social importance of energy while outlining the book's key topics and themes for prospective readers.
