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Description:

Energy is often associated with crisis, transition, conservation, storage, extraction, renewability, exhaustion, mobility, dwelling, acclimatization, and climate change. Despite being hard to define, the concept of energy is crucial to the analysis of problems of liveability, inequality, and geopolitics. As such, more insight is needed into the role of energy in spaces and lives, from energy efficiency and power cuts to the ways in which so-called energy transitions transform, connect, and oppose ecologies and places.

Energy has been theorised as crucial to understanding economic and affective exploitation and exhaustion (Brennan 2000), crises of capitalism (Bellamy and Diamanti 2018), the history and the future of fossil capital (Malm 2016, 2018), and new materialisms (Hess and Sovacool 2020, Murphy et al 2021). There is growing research concerning the re-energisation of extractivisms (Gudynas 2021), extractivismo (Riofrancos 2017), green extractivism (Voskoboynik and Andreucci 2021), neo-extractivism (Acosta 2013) and ecologies of extraction (Ureta and Flores 2022). Work on urban metabolism and political ecology have serve as a frame to look at the ways in which cities ‘transform raw materials, energy and water into the built environment, human biomass and waste’ (Decker et al 2000), prompting developments in understanding how energy shapes urban landscapes (Castan Broto 2019). In parallel, attention to invisible networks (Latour and Herman 2021) and infrastructures (Graham and Marvin 1996, Simone 2004, Larkin 2013) have contributed to more nuanced accounts of power in more-than-human geographies. But these framing must also consider the less populated urban and rural areas that are threatened and transformed by green grabbing (Fairhead 2012), global displacements (Kramarz et al 2021), and other spatial processes and conflicts generated by energy policy (Bridge and Gailing 2020) that have been highlighted by political ecology scholars and activists.
Energy is often associated with crisis, transition, conservation, storage, extraction, renewability, exhaustion, mobility, dwelling, acclimatization, and climate change. Despite being hard to define, the concept of energy is crucial to the analysis of problems of liveability, inequality, and geopolitics. As such, more insight is needed into the role of energy in spaces and lives, from energy efficiency and power cuts to the ways in which so-called energy transitions transform, connect, and oppose ecologies and places.

This session seeks to bring together different perspectives on how energy is produced, transported, stored, and consumed in specific places, how it links the fates of distant geographies, and how it is crucial to the functioning of cities, homes, mining projects, national economies, and global supply chains. We are also interested in how the inter-conversion between energy and matter produces ecologies, inequalities, resistances, and other forms of agency in the critical spaces of these conversions.


Works cited:
Acosta, A. 2013 Extractivism and Neoextractivism: Two Sides of the Same Curse. In M. Lang and D. Mokrani (Eds.), Beyond Development. Alternative Visions from Latin America (pp. 61-86). Amsterdam; Quito: Transnational Institute; Rosa Luxemburg Foundation.
Bellamy, B.R., Diamanti, J., 2018. Materialism and the Critique of Energy. MCM’.
Brennan, T., 2013. Exhausting Modernity, Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203469286
Bridge, G., Gailing, L., 2020. New energy spaces: Towards a geographical political economy of energy transition. Environ Plan A 52, 1037–1050. https://doi.org/10.1177/0308518X20939570
Castán Broto, V., 2019. Urban Energy Landscapes. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108297868
Decker, E.H., Elliott, S., Smith, F.A., Blake, D.R., Rowland, F.S., 2000. Energy and Material Flow Through the Urban Ecosystem. Annual Review of Energy and the Environment 25, 685–740. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.energy.25.1.685
Fairhead, J., Leach, M and Scoones, I Green Grabbing: a new appropriation of nature? In The Journal of Peasant Studies, https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/03066150.2012.671770 (accessed 10.24.22).
Graham, S., Marvin, S., 2001. Splintering Urbanism: Networked Infrastructures, Technological Mobilities and the Urban Condition. Routledge.
Hess, D.J., Sovacool, B.K., 2020. Sociotechnical matters: Reviewing and integrating science and technology studies with energy social science. Energy Research & Social Science 65, 101462. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.erss.2020.101462
Kramarz, T., Park, S., Johnson, C., 2021. Governing the dark side of renewable energy: A typology of global displacements. Energy Research & Social Science 74, 101902. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.erss.2020.101902
Latour, B. and Hemant, E. 2021 Paris Ville Invisible. B42 Malm, A., 2018. The Progress of This Storm: Nature and Society in a Warming World. Verso Books.
Malm, A., 2016. Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming. Verso Books.
Murphy, P., Brereton, P., O’Brolchain, F., 2021. New materialism, object-oriented ontology and fictive imaginaries: new directions in energy research. Energy Research & Social Science 79, 102146. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.erss.2021.102146
Riofrancos, T., 2020. Extractivism and Extractivismo | Global South Studies, U.Va. [WWW Document]. URL https://globalsouthstudies.as.virginia.edu/key-concepts/extractivism-and-extractivismo (accessed 10.24.22).
Simone, A.M., 2004. People as Infrastructure: Intersecting Fragments in Johannesburg. Public Culture 16, 407–429.
Turley, B., Cantor, A., Berry, K., Knuth, S., Mulvaney, D., Vineyard, N., 2022. Emergent landscapes of renewable energy storage: Considering just transitions in the Western United States. Energy Research & Social Science 90, 102583. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.erss.2022.102583
Ureta, S., Flores, P., 2022. Worlds of Gray and Green: Mineral Extraction as Ecological Practice.

Non-Presenting Participants