Short Abstract

This panel explores changing cultural visibility and opacity of energy in anthropological research and impacts on energy justice and sustainability. It asks how scholars might contribute to “energy with conscience” (Hughes) in the face of structural inequity, climate change and polarization.

Long Abstract

Advocacy for energy justice and sustainability confronts a cultural blindness in relation to energy: the tendency in industrialized places to take energy services for granted, and delegate analysis of energy to experts. “Seeing” energy occurs in crises: e.g. blackouts (Rupp), price hikes, or pollution of fence-line communities (Ottinger). Climate chaos makes energy/financial crises more frequent. Neoliberal mystifications include the opacity of financialized energy futures trading and utility debt that obscure public scrutiny of engines of wealth extraction, engineered complexity that obscures risks and public costs of market-based electricity; and stylized knowledge used to justify subsidies for speculative green strategies like carbon capture.

This panel explores understandings, dilemmas and strategies for anthropology of the energy transition in a polarizing world where fossil energy heightens structural inequality – what David Hughes called “energy without conscience.”

We welcome researchers on social justice and energy policies, carbon emissions, energy poverty, market-based grids, energy regulation, carbon mitigation, renewables, community-based energy, and political economy/ecology of energy and climate change.

● How is energy’s visibility changing? How are opacities enabled, configured and maintained?

● How are ideals of knowability—such as ‘transparency’—enacted in relation to energy and climate?

● To what degree are authoritarian politics a reactionary response to climate/energy/financial crises and the threat posed by cost-effective renewables to fossil power structures? (Christophers)

● How can we as scholars become “social engineers” for energy with conscience amid increasing threats to public discourse and advocacy?

This Panel has 1 pending paper proposal.
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