Cultures of Energy Transition
Virtual Session
Description
“Energy transition isn’t a choice. It’s not a matter of whether we transition or not — there’s no ‘if’ involved. We will have to transition. The question is whether we are able to successfully do so, and do so in a just manner. My hope is that if we come to understand that energy transition is also a social transition that we’ll have rich and wonderful lives, if very different ones than those we have now.” (Imre Szeman, Interview in The Beam #3, 2016)
Over the past decade, the energy humanities has emerged as a crucial subfield within the environmental humanities. Challenging the assumption that energy is purely a technical or economic issue, scholars of the energy humanities invite us to consider its cultural representations and dimensions. Or, put another way: humanities perspectives, methods, and traditions are crucial to the study of energy. How we produce and consume energy is at the heart of human experience: energy shapes not only cultural production, but our desires, our relationships to time and space, and our relationships to each other and more-than-human beings. Meanwhile, energy systems depend upon, obscure, and normalize environmental injustice. In Fueling Culture: 101 Words for Energy and Environment, Imre Szeman, Jennifer Wenzel, and Patricia Yaeger offer a compendium of keywords for EH that index energy’s significance to modernity and “stretch our thinking by telling us what we do not quite know about energy as the source and limit of culture.” Contributing authors provide fresh insight on a range of important terms like “Boom,” “Coal,” “Fracking,” “Texas,” “Limits,” “Grids,” “Aboriginal” and more. These terms reflect the social, cultural, colonial, and geo-political questions that inflect our engagement with – and dependence on – energy.
Curiously, however, one keyword remains absent from the compendium: “Transition.” Imre Szeman reminds us that “energy transition isn’t a choice. It’s not a matter of whether we transition or not — there’s no ‘if’ involved. We will have to transition.” Transition, then, is a fraught sociopolitical question of how … how to extract ourselves from fossil fuels with an attention to social justice and historical repair? In this panel, we invite papers that 1) engage with and complicate existing concerns within the energy humanities and 2) help theorize our understanding of a just energy transition within the Anthropocene. We aim to explore questions relating to the following: How are artists engaging with transitional infrastructures? What are the material histories of energy transition and what are the new minerals/energy sources that spark possible futures? What do we mean by a “just transition” in terms of race, gender, sexuality, and class? How can form, genre – and cultural production broadly – help us imagine such futures into being? What further social imperatives must animate transition? What communities of care arise within and alongside our energy transition?
Schedule
Papers
Speaker Bio
Elizabeth M. Holt is an associate professor in the Division of Languages and Literature at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson where she directs the Common Course in Carbon and the Humanities. Elizabeth is author of Fictitious Capital: Silk, Cotton, and the Rise of the Arabic Novel, and publishes extensively on Arabic literature in a comparative context.
Speaker Bio
Claire F. Fox is a Professor of English at the University of Iowa. Her research and teaching interests include literatures and cultures of the Americas, US-Mexico border studies, Latinx studies, and visual culture studies. As a 2024 Fulbright Canada Research Chair, she conducted research in Alberta on museums and heritage sites associated with the extraction of coal, oil, and natural gas.
Speaker Bio
Dr. Seign-Goura Yorbana is an independent social scientist and researcher (Ph.D.), holding advanced degrees from institutions such as the Catholic University of Central Africa (Yaoundé, Cameroon), the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies (Geneva, Switzerland), and the University of Neuchâtel (Neuchâtel, Switzerland). He is deeply committed to continuous learning and collaboration with peers and experts.
As a prolific author, Dr. Yorbana has published extensively on development-related topics, particularly focusing on the extractive industries in Chad and Africa. His book, Chinese Direct Investment in Africa: The Case of the China National Petroleum Corporation International Chad (Paris: L'Harmattan, 2014), highlights the complexities of Chinese involvement in Africa's extractive sector.
His research interests encompass a wide range of critical issues, including the sociology of sustainable development, natural resource management, extractive industries, illicit financial flows, security concerns, trade and development, energy transition, energy justice, corporate social responsibility, business and human rights, and the China-Africa relationship. Dr. Yorbana’s work aligns closely with Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and seeks to address global challenges through an interdisciplinary approach.
Contact: [email protected]
Speaker Bio
Anna Aschauer is a PhD student in the department of Comparative Literature at the Graduate Center, CUNY. She is interested the narrative entanglements surrounding histories of fossil combustion. Before joining CUNY, she earned her MA in English and American Studies at the University of Graz.
Speaker Bio
Martin Premoli is an assistant professor in English at Pepperdine University. He works in the fields of contemporary British literature, postcolonial studies, and the environmental humanities.
Papers
Speaker Bio
Daniel Vitkus holds the Rebeca Hickel Endowed Chair in Early Modern Literature at the University of California, San Diego. He is the author of Turning Turk: English Theater and the Multicultural Mediterranean, 1570-1630 and of numerous articles and book chapters on the literature and cultural history of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Vitkus has edited Three Turk Plays from Early Modern England (Columbia UP) and Piracy, Slavery and Redemption: Barbary Captivity Narratives from Early Modern England (Columbia UP). He has just completed a book, co-authored with Jyotsna Singh, called A Contextual Companion to Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra, to be published by Edinburgh University Press in 2025. His book-length work-in-progress is tentatively titled Solarpunk Shakespeare: Political Ecology, Materialism, and the Human.
Speaker Bio
Casey A. Williams is a Lecturer in the Center for Environmental Studies at Rice University, in Houston, Texas. He is a cultural theorist whose work investigates narratives of climate change and energy transition.
Speaker Bio
Jason Bircea is an advanced graduate student in the English department at UC Berkeley. His dissertation, Residual Forms, asks what decayed and decaying cultural and organic forms might reveal about the social (re)orderings that were taking place around the gradual and uneven changes to ecological regimes of production throughout the long eighteenth-century. Turning from contemporary ecocriticism’s investments in narratives of epochal transformation, the project argues instead that attending to the residual–to what remains, adapts, and persists, despite the experience of domination–can open us onto an alternative understanding of early modernity that centers experiences and articulations of continuity in discontinuity, of resistance and overlap.
Speaker Bio
Izzy Lockhart is an assistant professor of English at New York University. Izzy teaches and researches twentieth-century and contemporary literature across the fields of the environmental humanities, energy studies, and Native American and Indigenous studies.