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- Convenors:
-
Mariana Riquito
(University of Amsterdam)
Michelle Geraerts (University of Amsterdam)
Eleonora Gea Piccardi (Centre for Social Studies, University of Coimbra)
Zane Datava (Norwegian University of Science and Technology)
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- Formats:
- Roundtable
Short Abstract
This roundtable explores the colonial dynamics embedded in Europe's green transition, inviting feminist and decolonial approaches that reimagine energy, mobility, and transformations, beyond extractivism and displacement.
Long Abstract
As attachments to fossil modernity loosen, the dominant re-attachment has become green growth - a discursive chain translating sustainability into decarbonization and decarbonization into capital-driven renewable expansion (Szeman & Boyer 2017). Across Europe, lithium mining projects, hydrogen corridors, solar power plants, electric car adoption, and other “green” energy projects promise cleaner futures while extending extractive frontiers and reproducing colonial logics (Bridge 2013; Dunlap 2020; Riofrancos 2020; Bonelli & Dorador 2021).
This roundtable gathers anthropologists, artists, and activists engaged in ecofeminist and decolonial ethnographies of green energy to interrogate how such projects transform local worlds, livelihoods, and relations of care. Grounded in field or militant work from Europe’s extractive peripheries as well as central places of hyperconsumption, participants examine how “green” energy projects reproduce hierarchies imbued in colonial logics, while reconfiguring local worlds of care, kinship, and survival. Through stories, images, and situated reflections, we explore how different communities - rural, scientific, activist and beyond - are navigating, contesting, and reimagining these extractive futures.
Following Mario Blaser’s (2025) notion of displacement - the colonial movement of worlds that renders some relations possible while erasing others - we consider how energy infrastructures not only circulate power and materials but also reorder futures, attachments, and worlds. Inspired by Ursula Le Guin’s "Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction" (1986), we approach ethnography as a vessel for gathering and sustaining relations rather than a tool of mastery. We ask: What forms of life and relation do "green" energy projects make and unmake? How can feminist and decolonial ethnographies open space for imagining energy and mobility otherwise - grounded not in extraction, but in reciprocity, repair, and shared vulnerability? How can ecofeminism and decolonial thought help us to go beyond the "green infernal alternative" (Stengers and Pignarre 2005), daring to dream and act beyond the "low-carbon" future?
Accepted contributions
Session 1Contribution short abstract
This thesis explores a new perspective on the legacies of colonial rule in Senegal's green financing.
Contribution long abstract
This study examines the fictions and realities of delivering renewable energy infrastructure in Senegal, tracing the injustices of colonialist capitalist financing and their impact on rural communities' experiences.
Global investors and national policies promote solar electrification as a climate strategy and a socially equitable renewable energy source. Still, an urgent need for action is underpinned and hampered by colonial-era logics revealed by fieldwork realities.
Climate finance in Senegal relies on foreign donors, and the country's electrification schemes exclusively favour large-scale utility projects, despite claims to the contrary.
Drawing on a multi-sited ethnographic study of rural Senegal's off-grid electricity projects, this research reveals an industry that highlights residues of colonial rule in Senegal's green financing. The country's energy system has been designed to prioritise financially rewarding areas at the expense of remote villages. Urban-rural disparities in securing funding can be traced back to the colonial period. Meanwhile, the country's history of extensive borrowing strengthens its links with foreign capital networks.
Moreover, the country's energy governance routinely adopts and implements large-scale solar infrastructure with little regard to efficiency and affordability. This project seeks to integrate the persistence of colonialism into energy studies, thereby assisting in understanding energy generation from the perspective of rural communities, as colonial and imported models dominate the country's energy projects. By exposing the limits of large-scale electrification projects and shedding light on the real needs of rural communities, the study aims to drive the development of more equitable, domestically tailored energy systems.
Contribution short abstract
Based on ethnography of heat pump adoption, this paper uses STS and feminist care ethics to analyse domestic sensory disruption and uneven agency. It shows how households contest green-growth paradigms through tinkering, humanizing, and repair, revealing relational dimensions of energy transitions.
Contribution long abstract
This contribution draws on ethnographic research on heat pump installations in Dutch housing to explore two intertwined dimensions of household energy transitions: the sensory reconfiguration of everyday life and the uneven distribution of agency, particularly between tenants and homeowners. Framed through feminist care ethics, the heat pump is understood not as a neutral efficiency device but as a materialization of care and power. In domestic spaces, it privileges techno-economic ideals of rational control, optimization, and autonomy, often subordinating relational and embodied forms of care that sustain everyday life.
Lower-temperature, continuous heating displaces familiar sensory cues, producing discomfort or anxiety, especially for bodies that diverge from assumed norms, including women, elderly, and disabled residents. Noise, thermal, and air quality standards are inscribed through the technology, enforcing bodily and sensorial homogeneity. Homeowners may frame such disruption as minor inconveniences within a project of ecological self-improvement, whereas tenants, who often face opaque, imposed systems that leave little room for negotiation or repair, are disproportionally burdened by the sensorial, cognitive, and emotional labour of adaptation. Care in these cases takes a paternalistic form.
By situating household practices alongside questions of class, agency, and infrastructural power, this research interrogates the dominant focus on innovation and green growth, which often obscures relational and affective dimensions of energy. In dialogue with ecofeminist and decolonial perspectives, it asks how attention to domestic care, sensorial engagement, and contested agency can open space for alternative, relational, and ethically grounded energy futures.
Contribution short abstract
Based on militant research with the Alliance against Energy Poverty in Catalonia, this contribution explores how women affected by the energy model transform into collective political subjects, challenging dominant energy regimes through care, reciprocity, and collective agency.
Contribution long abstract
This research draws on militant and participatory research with the Alliance against Energy Poverty (APE) in Catalonia to interrogate how Europe’s green transition produces new forms of displacement. While green growth narratives frame decarbonization as a technical solution, they often obscure how energy infrastructures reproduce colonial hierarchies, uneven vulnerabilities, and forms of social abandonment—particularly for racialized, feminized, and precarious populations living at the margins of energy systems.
Starting from the lived experiences of women affected by energy poverty, the research examines how the category of “people affected by the energy model” is not merely descriptive but politically produced through collective struggle. Within APE’s methodology of collective counseling—horizontal spaces of mutual aid and political action—individualized experiences of deprivation are reframed as structural injustice, enabling participants to move from stigmatized victims to collective political subjects capable of contesting dominant energy regimes.
Building on this experience, the research broadens the notion of “affected” beyond energy poverty to encompass harms produced across the energy system, including extractivism, territorial dispossession, and climate-related impacts. This expanded category allows connections between urban contexts of energy deprivation in Europe and extractive and climate-affected territories in the Global South, highlighting the transnational and colonial dimensions of the green transition.
Contribution short abstract
Wind energy expansion in Finnmark, Norway, creates conflict with Sámi rights and local livelihoods. This study explores youth visions for a sustainable future, guided by the Sámi concept of birgejupmi (interconnectedness), amidst climate change and rapid energy development.
Contribution long abstract
This contribution explores the tensions arising from EU Green Deal climate change mitigation measures and young peoples’s futures in Finnmark, the northernmost county of Norway. Finnmark is also set on the land that is home to the Indigenous Sámi communities whose culture, way of living, and identity are deeply interconnected with the land, sea, and coastscapes. Labelled as a strategic frontier for European energy strategies, Finnmark is increasingly targeted by large-scale wind park developments, generating conflict between climate goals, Indigenous rights, and local visions of sustainable living. Through a workshop with local youth in the municipality of Unjárga/Nesseby, we created a space of reflection on sustainable livelihoods and inclusive environmental decision-making amidst these rapid changes. Western Finnmark faces a high youth emigration rate, prompting local municipalities to seek strategies for retaining and attracting young residents. This research, guided by the Northern Sámi concept of birgejupmi – interconnectedness and self-sufficiency – navigates participants' visions for a “good life” and explores how birgejupmi informs their understanding of a sustainable future. This contribution seeks to contribute to decolonial approaches to knowledge production and highlight the crucial role of young voices in shaping just and sustainable Arctic futures.