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- Convenors:
-
Pauline Destree
(Durham University)
Mette High (University of St Andrews)
Sean Field (University of St Andrews)
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- Stream:
- Who Speaks and for Whom?
- Sessions:
- Thursday 1 April, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
Who speaks for energy? This panel explores how responsibility and authority frame the social worlds of energy production, consumption, distribution and disposal; and, the role of anthropologists in researching and representing the people, communities, and non-humans connected by energy.
Long Abstract:
Energy is a necessity of life. How energy is harvested from the environment, however, and the repercussions of energy consumption, are of growing public concern and a central contributor to anthropogenic climate change. In a global yet highly unequal energy economy, questions of responsibility and authority are crucial to understanding the entangled social and material complexities of our energy present(s) and futures. This panel explores the ethical tensions and power dynamics vested in the social worlds of energy production, consumption, distribution and disposal. We ask: How are responsibility and authority crafted, accepted and challenged by those who speak for energy? And, in turn, by the people, communities, and non-humans that are dependent on and adversely affected by human energy practices? How do non-humans figure in energy dilemmas? Can, and should they be represented in the anthropology of energy, and by whom? How do we reconcile analysis of the energy sector’s provision of global energy needs and contribution to climate change with the voices, stories, beliefs, ethical sensibilities, lives and livelihoods of people who work in the fossil fuel, nuclear and renewable energy industries? Do anthropologists have a responsibility to avoid favouring or opposing some energy sources and voices over others? How do we, as anthropologists, navigate the ethical tensions of working with conflicting voices and demands for representation in a highly contentious field? This panel welcomes papers that reflect on the ethical challenges, tensions, and opportunities associated with ethnographically researching energy from field sites around the world.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Thursday 1 April, 2021, -Paper short abstract:
Energy transition in Greece rests on an uneven ecological regime informing multiscalar conflicts, entitlements and legitimacies. Tracing the social and moral tensions over authority and redistribution, this paper discusses the conditions of possibilities for acting and imagining an eco-just future.
Paper long abstract:
Since the 1990s, the Greek energy sector has undergone radical transformations as the EU project of common energy market and climate change policies met the orthodoxy of austerity: a system of social and spatial redistribution of resources, authority, responsibility and debt. Energy restructuring involved qualitative changes in the energy mix, due to growing natural gas and renewable sources’ input. It also directed major shifts in the ownership status of capital via recurrent waves of privatization and state-backed boost of green private investments. Based on long ethnographic fieldwork at the coal-mining region of Kozani, this paper discusses the energopolitics of austerity linking global logics of accumulation to the lived experience of workers and farmers involved in energy production and consumption. The expropriation of surrounding-the-mine villages, the big-scale investments for solar and wind energy, the transformation of agricultural land into photovoltaic parks, and the budgeting of EU’s Just Transition Fund have fueled profound moral struggles and social antagonisms: what is a just energy transition and who gets to speak for it? The current uneven ecological regime informed multiscalar conflicts, entitlements and legitimacies between energy producers and consumers, land property and labor rights, the public and the private. These tensions over authority and ecological redistribution have, in their turn, shaped the conditions of possibilities for acting and imagining an eco-just future.
Paper short abstract:
Amongst the remnants of County Durham's 'coalonial' past present in its rural landscape are many disused mines. Recently, there has been growing interest in using them to provide geothermal power. We explore this phenomenon and ask who speaks for the ex-miners and the mines, and how do they do so?
Paper long abstract:
The Durham County Council declared a climate emergency in 2019. This development was part of a growing trend of English local government responding to both the Paris Climate Agreement's targets and their residents' demands by seeking to create alternative, decarbonised futures. Among the many proposals for decarbonising Durham has been the suggestion that geothermal heat could be extracted from underground mines to provide energy in former colliery towns. In this paper, we ask whose voices are represented - who speaks on behalf of disused mines, ex-miners and their families? How are they represented and representing themselves as solutions are imagined, energy sources modelled, and plans are made for the use of geothermal mine water? Moreover, does the proposed plan for geothermal energy source address their ethical, social and financial concerns?
These questions of representation are of profound moral importance. In 1956 Henriques, Dennis and Slaughter argued in their seminal ethnography of a West Yorkshire pit village, Coal is Our Life, that they did not need to speak on behalf of a British miner as he was quite capable of speaking for himself. However, in post- 'coalonial' County Durham, many of those from former mining towns have felt frustrated and unrepresented by successive governments in the decades since English coal mining was consigned to history. Consequently, it is of paramount significance to explore the processes by which lives were, and indeed are, entangled with disused, underground mines. To ask how such parties are incorporated into the area's future.
Paper short abstract:
Drawing on ethnographic field research that began in late-2018, I contrast the voices of white corporate leaders calling for racial reforms with the experiences of non-white interlocutors inside the US hydrocarbon industry.
Paper long abstract:
Narratives from the world's leading hydrocarbon companies and financiers on the death of George Floyd serve as my point of departure to explore conceptualizations of responsibility in Houston’s hydrocarbon sector. Drawing on ethnographic field research that began in 2018, I contrast the voices of white corporate leaders calling for racial reforms with the experiences of non-white interlocutors inside the industry. The experiences of non-white interlocutors illuminate their idiosyncratic entanglements with responsibility and the corporal limits of their expertise. I contribute to the anthropological literatures on responsibility, expertise and energy by examining racial disparities inside Houston’s hydrocarbon sector. I suggest that the lack of corporate accountability for these disparities forms a broader pattern of responsibility side-stepping, which forecloses possibilities for change.