Energy Transitions: Culture, Pedagogy, Degrowth
5-6 June 2024
H204 Humanities Institute, University College Dublin, Ireland
Co-organisers: Dr Treasa De Loughry, Dr Sharae Deckard, Caleb O’Connor
We’re delighted to announce our two-day workshop and symposium this June on the ‘Pedagogies of Degrowth’ and the ‘Cultures of Energy Transitions’. Details below.
- Full Schedule with Registration Links and Abstracts here
- Detailed schedule and useful readings for “The Degrowth University Workshop” here
****************************
Day 1, June 5th: Energy Transitions: National and Institutional
Register here
1030-1100am: Welcome/Tea/ Coffee
11am-1230pm Irish Energy Transitions: A Roundtable
Speakers: Lily Toomey (Trinity College Dublin), Dylan Murphy (University College Dublin), Tomas Buitendijk (University College Dublin), Aoife Kirk (Community Wetlands Forum), Sheena Wilson (University of Alberta)
This roundtable will briefly give an overview of the major frictions, historical legacies, and promised future outcomes of energy transitions in Ireland. It will dwell on how communities have been affected by, and understand, the ‘just transition’ following the closure of peat-based electricity industries in the midlands; how communities have engaged with restoration efforts after the exhaustion of peat; national activism against fossil fuel use and extraction; and the government’s current plans for off- and onshore renewable energy.
1230-2PM LUNCH
1400-1700 The Degrowth University: A Workshop
Facilitated by Nick Lawrence, Pablo Mukherjee, Jonathan Skinner
This workshop, curated by colleagues affiliated with Warwick University’s (UK) Critical Environments research cluster, is an invitation to model ways of degrowing the research university. Participants will work together to produce degrowth syllabi and curricula, write degrowth job descriptions, imagine degrowth governance and administration, model degrowth recruitment and admissions policies, and sketch out degrowth research agendas. In so doing, we will explore the possibility of thinking about degrowth as one of the key catalysts for academic activism, rather than a movement that drives academics and activists apart.
Workshop outline:
- The University, Growth and Environment: the specific environmental and growth/developmental trajectories of the contemporary university
- Theories of growth, development and culture in higher education and pedagogy
- Practice, teaching, research and activism
- Group Tasks: proposing new module/ course; developing a research-led campaign, organising for governance change
Full schedule and readings which have inspired the workshop are here
**************************
DAY 2, June 6th
Cultures of Energy Transition: A Symposium
H204 Humanities Institute, UCD
Register here
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.
This symposium will probe how an analysis of creative and critical works, and global historical case studies, from sites as varied as Canada, Ireland, Japan, Russia, the UK, US, and Western Sahara, offers us ways into interrogating the desires, affects and community formations generated by carbon-based societies, while imagining alternative nature-society relations (MacDonald 2014). Papers will examine cultural responses to the utopian promises and contested enclosures emerging from the transition to renewable energy; including analyses of historical energy transitions 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); and the role of speculative utopian imaginaries in narrating anticipated energy futures (Williams 2019, Deckard 2022).
9-930 WELCOME/ TEA/ COFFEE
930-1045 KEYNOTE 1:
Sheena Wilson (University of Alberta) “Survival of the most Collaborative: New Logics for Transition”
1045am-1215pm PANEL 1: Historical Energy Transitions and Labour:
Katja Bruisch (Trinity College Dublin) “Visible and invisible histories of extractive labour from the forgotten margins of Russia’s fossil economy”
Lily Toomey (Trinity College Dublin) “Energy Consumption and the Changing Materiality of Peat in the Irish Home”
Hiroki Shin (Queen’s University Belfast) “The Dream and Fear of Energy Transition: The Problematics of Peripheral Convergence in Early Twentieth-Century Japan”
1215-1315: LUNCH
1315-1445 PANEL 2: Ecology, Culture and Disrupting Transitions:
Joanna Allan (Northumbria University) “The role of wind imaginaries in (colonial) energy developments in Western Sahara”
Alexandra Campbell (University of Glasgow) “Sonic Revolt and Abolition Ecologies: Sounding Transition”
Nick Lawrence (University of Warwick)
1445-1500: BREAK: TEA/COFFEE
1500-1600 PANEL 3: Energy Routes and Poetic Experimentation
Jonathan Skinner (University of Warwick) & Lucy Burnett (Lancaster University) “Energy Transition Zones, from the Irish Sea to the far Western Fells: A Route for Scree”
1600-1715 KEYNOTE 2:
Rhys Williams (University of Glasgow)
1715-1730 CONCLUSION
1915 DINNER
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. Contact Principle Investigator, Dr Treasa De Loughry, with any questions. The project team consists of Dr Treasa De Loughry, Dr Sharae Deckard, and Caleb O’Connor.