Paper short abstract:

This presentation offers an invitation to engage with so-called energy poverty in the Global South differently. Based on the author’s ongoing ethnographic research in rural Indonesia, it will discuss some reflections that emerge from pursuing such possibilities.

Paper long abstract:

In this presentation, I offer my invitation to rethink how we conceptualise energy poverty in the Global South in a manner that moves beyond its modernist framings. In doing so, I follow the calls within the literature to problematise the traditional vs. modern energy binary that continues to permeate the energy poverty and development discourse, while also taking seriously the mundanity of such everyday energy realities. Resulting from such an approach is the recognition of how people’s lived experiences of energy poverty are consequently shaped by the multitude of power relations, as well as retaining their singularities that elude any effort of simplistic categorisation. Inspired by narrative phenomenology in anthropology and human geography, I seek to understand people’s own appraisals of what constitutes energy poverty as they move through their everyday lives, and how such world-making projects are affectively emergent from which questions of hopes, despairs and anxieties coalesce into an unnamed mosaic. Indeed, this unknowability is what renders energy poverty difficult to represent, but also opens up the possibility to rethink it differently. This quality also brings up a different picture of “energy poor” subjects that do not simply conform to the Enlightenment ideals, whereby rationalities are valorised as the cornerstone for a (linear) improvement. In such stories, far from staying idle, everyday materialities are becoming central to yet inseparable from the continuous remaking of people’s energy experiences. Drawing on my ongoing ethnographic work in rural Indonesia, I bring these alternative stories alive for reimagining energy poverty otherwise.