In this episode of Volatile Trajectories, you’ll hear from Darin Barney, Walter Gordon and Bob Johnson about how they define and defy the boundaries that exist between the interior and exterior of the university.
Walter Gordon is an IDEAL Provostial Fellow in the department of English at Stanford University, where he studies African American literature, energy, and the environment. Walter was recently a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Public Energy Humanities at the University of Alberta. He is currently working on a book titled Prime Movers: Energy and Modernity in African American Literature, which tracks the interlinked literary histories of King Coal and Jim Crow, among other entanglements of race and energy. Darin Barney is Professor and Grierson Chair in Communication Studies at McGill University. Barney’s research concerns the forms and media of politics at the intersection of materials, energy, infrastructure and environments. His current work involves an investigation of emerging formats for the storage, transportation and use of bitumen in the Canadian oil patch, and infrastructural transformations in the Canadian grain sector. And Bob Johnson is author of Carbon Nation: Fossil Fuels in the Making of American Culture and Mineral Rites: An Archaeology of the Fossil Economy. His current work takes on the prevailing empiricist and alternative social constructivist paradigms in climate studies to reconceive climate as a hybridized object.
Their conversation is a stirring confrontation with what Darin calls “institutionalized knowledge practice” and the “agony” of the obvious contradiction between occupying sites of hegemonic power and actively working against what Robin D. G. Kelley has called the “prestige machine” of academia. Barney talks about the nascent field of the “energy humanities” as a site of knowledge production where this conflict is felt in a particularly explosive way, and suggests that can be a field where experts in energy transition embrace the goal of producing a more oppositional, politically-inflected and radically inclusive iteration of the university.
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In this episode of Volatile Trajectories, you’ll hear from Rhys Williams, Stacey Balkan, and Tommy Davis about how their hope for “revolutionary forms of infrastructure,” to guard against disastrous futures and quickly accelerating climate collapse, hinges in certain ways on both an “aesthetic education that centralizes conversations about more hopeful futures” and moving beyond merely imagining alternatives to doing the political work necessary to bring them into being.
But let me give you some background on Tommy, Rhys and Stacey. Tommy Davis is an Associate Professor of English at Ohio State University where he teaches courses in modern and contemporary literature, environmental humanities, and coordinates study abroad programs to southern Louisiana and Antarctica. He’s the author of The Extinct Scene: Late Modernism and Everyday Life and he is currently finishing his second book, Unnatural Attachments: Aesthetic Education and Ecological Crisis. Rhys Williams is a Lecturer in Energy and Environmental Humanities at the University of Glasgow. He works on the intersection of narrative and infrastructure in future-making, especially with respect to food and energy. He has written extensively on solar infrastructures and imaginaries, most recently in the journals South Atlantic Quarterly and Open Library of the Humanities. And Stacey Balkan is an Associate Professor of Environmental Literature and Humanities at Florida Atlantic University where she also serves as an affiliate faculty member for the university’s Center for Peace, Justice, and Reconciliation. She is the author of Rogues in the Postcolony: Narrating Extraction and Itinerancy in India and co-editor, with Dr. Swaralipi Nandi, of Oil Fictions: World Literature and our Contemporary Petrosphere.
This conversation is a lively one, recorded at a fairly noisy bistro, with all the sounds of people playing pool and children’s shoes squeaking. They seem to harness the energy of that space to engage with questions around how we’ve been sold a certain narrative about the inevitability of fossil fuels. Tommy talks about how it might be the responsibility of the “energy humanities” and environmental communicators to “expose that configuration as historical” and work to unmake it. But at the same time, Rhys points out that it’s not as simple as just undoing a narrative or exposing a history of manipulation. We have to engage with the degree to which “petrocultural” ideology is now a firmly “material thing,” solidified as social and empirical fact. This makes it much harder to dislodge, but identifies the enemy of energy transition in a more substantive way.
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In this episode, you’ll hear from Emily Eaton, Eva-Lynn Jagoe, Scott Stoneman, Mark Simpson and Penelope Plaza about our relationships to the places we know and care about, and about our discrete approaches to breaking the spell of fossil capitalism, petroculture, oil — the dominant energy regime of our time.
To give you a sense of who you’ll be listening to: Mark Simpson hosts this discussion. Mark is a settler scholar and professor in the Department of English and Film Studies at the University of Alberta (Treaty Six/Métis Territory). His work has appeared in South Atlantic Quarterly, Radical Philosophy, Postmodern Culture, and English Studies in Canada, among other venues. Emily Eaton is a professor in the department of geography and environmental studies at the University of Regina, in Treaty Four. She is a white settler whose research and teaching looks at the climate and inequality crises at local and national scales. Emily’s the author of two books: Fault Lines: Life and Landscape in Saskatchewan's Oil Economy and Growing Resistance: Canadian Farmers and the Politics of Genetically-Modified Wheat. Eva-Lynn Jagoe is a professor at University of Toronto, where she teaches cinema, literature, creative writing, and environment in the Spanish Department and in Comparative Literature. She is the author of Take Her, She's Yours. Penelope Plaza is a Venezuelan architect and researcher. Through her profession in the arts and urban activism Penelope developed an interest in the intersections between politics, culture, architecture and urban space.
Our conversation focuses on not just a love of the land, but stubborn attachments to particular uses of the land. Ways of cultivating, caring for, and working the land that have complex histories and serious consequences. We talk about the language of maintenance, both in terms of the maintenance of infrastructure, and in the context of a larger push for a culture of care that sees us taking a backseat to the land’s understanding of itself.
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In this episode, you’ll hear from Allan Stoekl, Sarah Marie Wiebe, Casey Williams, and Imre Szeman about the political structures that constrain the collective agency required to combat climate change. It’s hard to summarize this expansive discussion, but it can maybe be captured best by three words: pleasure, solidarity and sacrifice—words that contain entire worlds.
Allan Stoekl is Professor Emeritus of French and Comparative Literature at Penn State. He’s written extensively on 20th and 21st century French and European intellectual history, and more recently on questions of energy use and sustainability. Sarah Marie Wiebe is Assistant Professor in the School of Public Administration at the University of Victoria. Her research focuses on environmental justice, public engagement and community-engaged research. Drawing upon her lived-experience, she is currently writing a manuscript entitled Hot Mess: Becoming a Mother during a Code Red Climate Emergency. Casey Williams recently graduated from Duke University's doctoral Literature Program. His research looks at how fossil-fueled modes of life and work have shaped political responses to climate change since the 1980s. And, finally, Imre Szeman, who moderates this discussion, is Director of the Institute for Environment, Conservation, and Sustainability and Professor of Human Geography at the University of Toronto Scarborough. He conducts research in energy humanities, environmental studies, and social and political philosophy.
Here they talk about how energy transition might not be as “pain-free” as petro-capitalists want to convince us it can be—with cleaner oil or carbon capture and storage paving the way to maintaining the status quo. That model of top-down climate leadership has clearly failed in many ways, where “decisions upstairs,” in Allan’s words, are thought to magically lead to far-reaching positive effects on the sovereign decisions of people on the ground.
In the face of that established neoliberal model, they try to think through what will be required to build mass support for energy transition at multiple scales.
Cara New Daggett, Swaralipi Nandi and Jennifer Wenzel about alternative models of climate action that centre care and critical thought.
Cara Daggett is a political theorist who teaches at Virginia Tech. Her research on feminist approaches to science and technology, and her writing on the politics of energy and the environment, has been extremely impactful. Her book The Birth of Energy and her writing on what she’s influentially called “petromasculinity” aren’t just widely cited, but serve as a guide for thinking about the problem of energy.
Swaralipi Nandi is an Assistant Professor of English at Loyola College. Her work involves energy humanities in the context of India, exploring questions of a colonial past, environmentalism of the global South, and diasporic labour in the oil fields of the Gulf. She’s the editor of The Postnational Fantasy: Essays on Postcolonialism, Cosmopolitics, and Science Fiction and Spectacles of Blood: A Study of Violence and Masculinity in Postcolonial Films.
Jennifer Wenzel is a professor of postcolonial theory and environmental and energy humanities at Columbia University. Her books include Bulletproof: Afterlives of Anticolonial Prophecy in South Africa and Beyond and The Disposition of Nature: Environmental Crisis and World Literature.
In this discussion you’ll hear Jennifer, Swaralipi and Cara work through a certain “cultural preference for… heroic action,” and critically consider the question of degrowth as a messy, complicated and consequential way of thinking around the catastrophe of relentless fossil fuel consumption. If, as Jennifer puts it, our “dreams and expectations” are “attached to the energy regimes of the present,” what different sort of “everyday are we fighting for?” Can more “daring” stories and more “chaotic” experiments stave off the seemingly inevitable amnesia that allows the current system to persist? If we have all the ideas and technologies we need, then what is missing?
Graeme Macdonald, Terra Schwerin Rowe and Hiroki Shin discuss the practice of “futuring,” or engaging with speculative futures, and think through how it might operate as a kind of corrective to what Terra terms the “domino effect” narrative of climate catastrophe.
Graeme Macdonald is Professor in the Dept. of English & Comparative Literary Studies, University of Warwick. His recent work includes an edited collection of Science Fiction Studies on "Food Futures” and one on Energy, Ecology and Climate in 21st Century Scottish Literature.
Terra Schwerin Rowe is Associate Professor in the Philosophy and Religion Department at the University of North Texas. Her research has focused on Protestantism, environmentalism, and capitalism, but her more recent research looks at Christianity, intersectionality, and extractivist energy cultures. Keep an eye out for her new book, which is entitled Of Modern Extraction: Experiments in Critical Petro-theology.
Hiroki Shin is a historian of energy, transport and the environment. His research explores past energy transitions by considering energy markets, resource politics, and infrastructure, but also by thinking about consumer culture and everyday practices.
Their conversation covers a lot of ground. They are interested in imagining methods for building a museum as both a conceptual and material set of artifacts and stories, because they share a sense that this space can motivate people to think about moving beyond petroculture. Hiroki talks about his sincere concern for the ways that, in many established museum spaces, people are sort of “taken in” by existing technology. In relation to this, Terra asks: “what is the future of the impossible?” If the modern museum reinscribes some notion of the “technological sublime” of fossil-fueled industrialism, can it also be fitted to the possibility of a massive energy transition in the present and into the future?
