Cultures of Energy Transition

“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?