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Drawing on two decades of research in Central Africa, we examine how environmental knowledge in extractive zones is produced through compromised regimes of expertise involving social scientists & intermediaries, shaped by racial capitalism, technocratic governance, & precarious academic labour.

Paper long abstract

Drawing on two decades of research on extractive industries in Central and West Africa, this paper argues that environmentalism in African extractive zones is a historically situated field of struggle shaped by racial capitalism, technocratic governance, and uneven regimes of expertise, including corporate, academic, and grassroots forms. Focusing on the roles of social scientists, consultants, and expert intermediaries embedded in mining and oil economies, we examine how environmental knowledge is produced through compromise, ambivalence, and coercion within extractive projects themselves. We show how such knowledge is frequently depoliticised and mobilised to render extraction governable. Instruments such as environmental impact assessments, community consultations, and sustainability discourses acknowledge ecological harm while simultaneously foreclosing more transformative environmental futures. Based on forty interviews with social scientists and long-term engagement with extractive projects, we trace historical and geographical patterns of social science participation in extraction and develop a typology of motivations and roles. These include career advancement, disciplinary consolidation, explicit alignment with extractive objectives, efforts to mitigate harm through expert intervention, and financial incentives shaped by gendered and racialised precarity in academic labour markets. Across these positions, social scientists often describe contributing to outcomes understood as merely acceptable or preferable to worse alternatives, revealing the constrained ethical and political horizons within which environmental knowledge is produced. Communities, activists, and scholar-activists engage these constrained terrains strategically, generating forms of environmental politics that do not conform to dominant corporate or racial capitalist imaginaries.

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Viewing India’s energy transition through the lens of visibility, this paper examines rural–urban energy poverty and energy inequality using NSSO data. It shows how deprivation is obscured by transition narratives and calls for alternative energy-mix pathways from a sustainability perspective.

Paper long abstract

Rather than treating the energy crisis as a purely technical problem of supply deficits, this paper approaches it as a crisis of visibility — of how energy deprivation is conceptualised, measured, and rendered meaningful within policy and scholarly discourse. In the Indian context, where large segments of the population continue to live with inadequate, unreliable, or low-quality energy access, the question is not simply whether electricity connections exist, but how energy poverty is socially differentiated and unevenly experienced. Energy scarcity here is frequently mundane and routinised, rendered invisible within narratives of rapid electrification and economic growth. This raises concerns about energy justice: whose experiences of deprivation are counted, and whose are obscured.

The paper examines energy poverty in India by focusing on rural–urban variations in fuel use and access, drawing on household-level NSSO data from the 68th to 79th rounds (2011–12 to 2022-23). By constructing a Specific Concentration Curve (SCC), the study offers a stylised quantitative measure of inequality in the distribution of fuels. The paper demonstrates how formal indicators of energy access coexist with persistent forms of deprivation, revealing the structural reproduction of inequality within India’s evolving energy regime.

Building on these findings, the paper proposes alternative energy-mix configurations that attend to sustainability goals and social justice. Rather than offering predictive forecasts, the discussion outlines normatively grounded, attainable pathways to expand renewable energy that address entrenched energy poverty. In conclusion, the paper argues that a just energy transition requires visibility of deprivation within policy, practice, and scholarly imaginations globally.

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This paper explores the role of agrivoltaics amid conflicts over the growing visibility of solar energy expansion in Alberta. Drawing on ethnographic interviews, media, and policy analysis, it highlights how landscapes shape how agrivoltaics is imagined, negotiated, and implemented.

Paper long abstract

A recent expansion of green energy projects across rural areas and farming communities in Alberta has generated polarizing views and attitudes on how the land is lived and managed in a province long shaped by the fossil fuel industry. Farmers find themselves sharing their fields with hundreds of solar panels, impacting their operations and their relationship with the land. As solar energy development becomes more visible across the province, rural and farming communities frequently push to retain their way of life.

Defined as the spatial coexistence of agriculture and solar energy generation, agrivoltaics is presented as a “win-win” model that preserves farmland while increasing area for renewable energy development. While straightforward in concept, lived realities and imagined possibilities of agrivoltaics are far more complex. Economic and regulatory constraints, outdated grids, and local farming practices shape how agrivoltaics is understood and implemented, and narrow conceptualizations of what agrivoltaics looks like limits farmers’ own imaginaries.

Drawing from ethnographic interviews and media and policy analysis, this paper argues that agrivoltaics is not simply a technical solution, but a political and cultural project. When presented through narrow and universal models that overlook local realities, these technologies can contribute to uncertainty, uneven adoption, and persistent tensions over land. These representations strongly shape whether communities see agrivoltaics as an opportunity, a risk, or simply another imposed development. This paper raises questions on how we can guarantee a just transition for those whose livelihoods depend on shifting agro-energyscapes.

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This paper explores the process of decommissioning renewable energy infrastructure. It looks at the shifting social relations, infrastructural afterlives, and opaque futurities that accompany the unbuilding of a wind farm in Colombia’s energy frontier.

Paper long abstract

This paper explores the process of decommissioning renewable energy infrastructure. It looks at the shifting social relations, infrastructural afterlives, and opaque futurities that accompany the unbuilding of a wind farm in Colombia’s energy frontier. In 2023, EPM announced its decision to dismantle the Jepirachi wind farm, a first-of-its-kind renewable energy project that was built in Indigenous Wayúu land. Alleging financial and legal setbacks, the wind farm was disconnected from the grid in 2023. Its turbines have since remained motionless under the oppressive heat, as a decommissioning process proceeds awkwardly. The end of Jepirachi has undone a variety of relations that sustained the livelihood of Wayúu communities, from cash transfers and water infrastructure, while fueling anxieties about what will remain after two decades of the company's presence. Drawing on long-term ethnographic engagements, this paper asks what it means to endure the demise of a wind farm. It examines the social relations and affective uptakes that envelop the stillness of wind turbines and their imminent dismantling. Such process is viewed as socially and ecologically unjust largely because it is predicated on removing all visible traces of the wind farm, including any plans about what will come after. It is precisely the company’s intent of becoming invisible - after two decades of being the main source of income and basic services for many Indigenous dwellers - that makes the decommissioning process fraught. This shows the Wayúu’s reflective diagnoses of the politics of visibility and opacity of low-carbon infrastructures in their lives and futures.

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Energy systems are now perceptible through the art system where climate activism targeting artworks reflects a transformed visibility rather than opposition to art. Whereas earlier energy infrastructures were encountered through proximity today’s production is structured by perceptual ambivalence.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines how contemporary energy systems become perceptible through the art system and argues that recent climate activism targeting museum artworks reflects a transformed regime of visibility rather than opposition to art itself. Whereas earlier energy infrastructures were encountered through proximity and visual resemblance – coal bins, oil derricks, and power plants embedded in everyday life – today’s energy production operates at distance, structured by speed, mobility, and perceptual ambivalence. This shift produces what David Harvey terms an “externality field,” in which energy remains materially central but visually marginal. The paper distinguishes between two aesthetic regimes: resemblance and form. Resemblance organizes perception through likeness and continuity of scale, enabling claims to authenticity through visual replication. Form, by contrast, operates through abstraction, geometry, rhythm, and symbolic transposition, allowing infrastructures to circulate visually without requiring proximity. Drawing on examples from energy advertising, museum spaces, and activist interventions, the paper shows how the art system has become a primary mediator of energy perception. The recent destruction of artworks by climate activists is thus interpreted as an intervention into this regime of form. By targeting artworks – objects designed to concentrate attention and value -activists collapse the distance between refined urban visuality and obscured extractive geographies. These acts do not confuse art with infrastructure but exploit their structural equivalence as surrogate sight objects within an energy mediascape. The paper concludes that the collapse of resemblance into form has become the dominant aesthetic mode through which energy is rendered visible, governable, and contestable.

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This paper draws on research on deregulated utilities in Texas, the UK and the EU during high price periods since 2021 to examine the role of formal secrecy in preventing public scrutiny and reform of energy markets that inflate electric bills and delay climate goals.

Paper long abstract

Historians of electricity policy have noted the role of blackouts and price spikes on electric grids as forensic signals for diagnosing anomalies and illuminating sites for public or political intervention (Nye 2010, Graham and Thrift 2007). But conditions for and expectations of public utility regulation have changed in recent decades.

While researching a book –The Energy Permacrisis (Routledge 2026) - I encountered repeated failures of energy markets in de-regulated (usually privatized) grids to mitigate price spikes during high demand periods, often due to supply constraints and/or unusual weather. Such grids -- existing in roughly half US states and the EU -- often have internal oligopolistic, opaque energy markets with frequent volatility.

The paper briefly outlines evidence for 3 types of failures: (1) withholding natural gas supplies by oligopolies to drive up prices, (2) merit-order energy auctions that allow natural gas to dominate pricing and (3) abuses in balancing ( capacity) markets.

Speculative bidding by energy traders, insider knowledge and chronically weak regulation (e.g. European Court of Auditors 2023) contributed to outcomes - including windfall profits for energy firms, energy poverty, high public costs and fiscal threats to businesses.

I discuss insider insights on utility opacity, histories of deregulation (e.g. Isser 2019; Rutledge & Wright 2010), how it became hegemonic, and its relation to the corporate state and the spread of rentier capitalism in energy (Hudson 2015, Christophers 2022). Despite legal and political reform efforts, secrecy persists, exacerbating problems of sustainability and energy justice.