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Solar power has become the cheapest form of energy globally. Solar infrastructures – among the most effective mechanisms to mitigate the climate crisis – have been heralded as benign modalities of “development without destruction” (Government of India, 2015). Yet, recent scholarship into solar development has revealed patterns and regimes of “dispossession without development” (Levien, 2018). The present global influx of private and foreign investments for solar development (Siamanta, 2017; Kennedy, 2018) is characterized by accumulation strategies that transfer risks away from investors and towards communities (Kennedy and Stock, 2021). Throughout the solar photovoltaics (PV) value chain, numerous social and environmental injustices disproportionately impact poor and marginalized populations at the local scale (Mulvaney, 2019). Consider this summary overview:

• Solar PV is comprised of critical materials and metals fraught with supply chain challenges and injustices related to procurement (Sovacool et al, 2020a). Mining the vital components for solar PV (e.g. copper, cobalt, silica) often poses health risks to a precarious labor force and their communities (Sovacool et al, 2020b; Sovacool, 2019).
• Manufacturing solar panels reproduces patterns of industrialization characterized by uneven development (Brock et al, 2021). Manufacturing solar PV can also pose health risks to laborers and can contaminate terrestrial and marine ecosystems (Mulvaney, 2013). There have also been recent reports of exploited and forced labor in solar PV factories (Murphy and Elimä, 2021).
• Developing the sites for utility-scale solar energy also often entails the enclosure of vast stretches of marginal public lands discursively articulated as wastelands (Cantoni and Rignall, 2019; Stock, 2021a; Singh, 2022), constituting racial regimes of ownership (Stock, 2022a). Enclosing lands for large-scale solar often involves the dispossession of land from marginalized and smallholding peasants (Rignall, 2016; Yenneti et al, 2016; Bedi, 2019; Stock and Birkenholtz, 2021; Jonnalagadda et al, 2021), procedural injustices (Yenneti and Day, 2015), disempowering social development schemes (Stock, 2021b) and gendered dislocations of resource access (Stock and Birkenholtz, 2020).
• The solar rollout is riddled with inequitable governance arrangements (Sareen and Shokrgozar, 2022), and the provisioning of solar electricity through large-scale infrastructures is spatially uneven and fraught with asymmetric power dimensions at local scales (Sareen, 2022; Bedi, 2021; Sareen and Kale, 2018). Utility-scale solar can also exacerbate energy poverty and water scarcity in dryland areas (Stock, 2021c). Yet disparities in access also exist in solar systems of distributed generation and off-grid systems (Reames, 2020; Cross and Neumark, 2021; Sovacool et al, 2022).
• Downstream along the solar value chain, broken or non-functioning solar panels pose a looming threat to precarious laborers in scrapyards and vulnerable communities (Cross and Murray, 2018; Sovacool et al, 2020).

Acknowledging that the solar energy transition cannot thus far be considered a just transition (Newell and Mulvaney, 2013), “what is to be done?” Despite well-documented evidence of solar-related dispossessions, violence and oppression, solar PV remains among our best weapons for climate mitigation, abolishing petro-racial capitalism—e.g. solar energy reparations (Luke and Heynen, 2020)—and decolonizing energy regimes (Lennon, 2017). Resisting dispossessive solar is an essential step towards empowering the precarious labor force throughout the value chain (Stock, 2021d; Stock, 2022b). More equitable alternatives to large-scale dispossessive solar development are taking root but have thus far received insufficient scholarly attention (Siamanta, 2021; Nordholm and Sareen, 2021; Sareen, Grandin and Haarstad 2022).

Solar scholars often occupy an aporia, defined as “the difficult or the impracticable, here the impossible, passage, the refused, denied, or prohibited passage, indeed the nonpassage, which can in fact be something else, the event of a coming or of a future advent, no longer has the form of the movement that consists in passing, traversing, or transiting” (Derrida, 1993: 8). We posit that solar development is an aporia. After all, “We cannot not desire development” (Wainwright, 2008: 10). These sessions contemplate the aporias of solar PV development globally, seeking to illuminate critically constructive scholarly inquiry, foster emancipatory praxis and generate provocations for future research exploring themes that engage with the span of (but not limited to):

• Regimes of dispossessive solar development, but also decolonial, intersectional, anti-racist and/or anti-capitalist solar coalitions
• Production of difference and inequalities in solar development, but also redistributive and emancipatory solar interventions
• Politics of knowledge and discursive power in solar energy, but also novel methodological approaches to study solar development
• Whole systems analyses of solar PV value chains, but also their precarious labor geographies

If interested in presenting your research in these sessions, please send a 250-word abstract to Ryan Stock (rystock@nmu.edu) and Siddharth Sareen (siddharth.sareen@uis.no) by October 16th, 2022 that articulates your paper’s generative contributions to or novel departures from the aforementioned themes. We will notify you of your acceptance into these sessions by October 30th, 2022. The hope is that enough empirically defensible and theoretically robust papers are featured in this session, such that we can curate a special issue on critical geographical inquiries into solar development. For authors who are interested in being considered for inclusion in a special issue, please notify us of this upon emailing your abstract. Please note that not all papers featured in this AAG session are guaranteed to be included in the special issue. Such decisions are not personal and not taken lightly, so please do not consider a lack of inclusion in the special issue to be a referendum on the quality of your scholarship! Papers selected for the special issue will need to be submitted in draft form by March 5th, 2023 and submitted as a polished final draft (6-10,000 words) by May 7th, 2023. We strive for a face-to-face session, but are willing to pivot virtually if requested by participants out of an abundance of caution for the pandemic or out of necessity due to financial restraints.


References
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Non-Presenting Participants