June 5-6 2024: Degrowth and Cultures of Energy Transitions Symposium
by Treasa De Loughry
We’re delighted to announce our two-day workshop and symposium this June on the ‘Pedagogies of Degrowth’ and the ‘Cultures of Energy Transitions’. The full schedule and registration link will be released in April.
DAY ONE: 5 JUNE 2024
The Degrowth University: Structure, Curriculum, Pedagogy
Venue: H204, Humanities Institute, University College Dublin, Ireland (hybrid)
Workshop Led by Dr Nick Lawrence, Dr Jonathan Skinner, and Prof. Upamanyu Pablo Mukherjee (Critical Environments Research Cluster, University of Warwick)
In their 2017 survey of what they call the ‘academic paradigm’ of degrowth, Martin Weiss and Claudio Cattaneo conclude that “in less than a decade, degrowth has evolved from an activist movement into a vibrant multi-disciplinary academic field” (221). Perhaps inadvertently, they see this growing academic interest in degrowth as a move away from activism. In this workshop we question whether the distinction between academia and degrowth activism need be as strong as Weiss and Cattaneo assume. We aim to do this by examining the institutional context for producing the ‘academic paradigm’ of degrowth – namely, the research university itself. If it’s the case, as Schmelzer et al. have declared, that ‘the future is degrowth’ (2022), what is the relationship between today’s institutional sites of knowledge production and that (near) future? From finance to recruitment, campuses to rankings, research to ‘impact’ – every facet of the research university today takes ‘growth’ and ‘development’ as its raison d’être. How does this condition the academic literature on degrowth produced there? And in what ways might today’s research university be ‘de-grown’ by academic activists?
DAY TWO: 6 JUNE 2024
Cultures of Energy Transitions: A Symposium
Venue: H204, Humanities Institute, University College Dublin, Ireland
Keynote Speakers: Prof. Sheena Wilson (University of Alberta) and Dr Rhys Williams (University of Glasgow)
Confirmed Speakers: Dr Joanna Allan (Northumbria), Dr Katja Bruisch (Trinity College), Lucy Burnett, Dr Alexandra Campbell (Glasgow), Dr Nick Lawrence (Warwick), Dr Hiroki Shin (Queen’s), Dr Jonathan Skinner (Warwick), Lily Toomey (Trinity)
We are only at the beginning of how we conceptualise, critically and culturally, a post-fossil fuel future. But while energy sources like solar, hydro, wind, and geothermal power are often touted as the solution to climate change, socio-economic turbulence, or capitalist decline, critics have cautioned against the techno-utopianism ascribed to renewables. ‘Green’ energy cannot on its own provoke the system change required to reduce global carbon emissions.
As Sheena Wilson states, “we need to transform our imaginaries of who we are in relationship to this planet and to what futures are possible” (2021). Ethically transitioning away from carbon-dependency means reevaluating many of the cultural assumptions and values which enable the energy poverty, labour exploitation, and resource exhaustion that sustains fossil capital. Creative and critical works are uniquely positioned to interrogate the desires, affects and community formations generated by carbon-based societies, and in limning alternative nature-society relations (MacDonald 2014). This is especially true for the energy humanities, and postcolonial-ecocritical, feminist-materialist, queer-ecology, critical race, and indigenous perspectives, which have further probed what sustainable futures are being imagined in just transitionary discourse, through what cultural forms and tropes, and for whom.
This symposium invites papers examining cultural responses to the utopian promises and contested enclosures emerging from the transition to renewable energy. This might include analyses of historical energy transitions like dam projects as vehicles for liberatory anti-colonial narratives of resource sovereignty (Nixon 2011, Huber 2013, Barrett and Worden 2014); contemporary cultural resistance to top-down energy infrastructural development (Allan, Lemaadel, Lakhal 2022, Bresnihan and Brodie 2023); or the role of speculative utopian imaginaries, like solarpunk or slow narratives, in narrating anticipated energy futures (Williams 2019, Deckard 2022).
Co-organisers: Dr Treasa De Loughry, Caleb O’Connor, Dr Sharae Deckard
This event is funded by the UCD Humanities Institute and the College of Arts and Humanities Environmental Humanities Research Strand Grant, and the Ad Astra Research Fund.