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- Convenor:
-
Tak Uesugi
(Okayama University)
- Location:
- 103
- Start time:
- 16 May, 2014 at
Time zone: Asia/Tokyo
- Session slots:
- 1
Short Abstract:
The presenters of this panel explore how renewable energy infrastructures (including electricity production, distributions and monitoring and forecasting of weather, water and geothermal reservoir, and consumption level) are reconfiguring relations between humans, technologies and nature.
Long Abstract:
The 2011 nuclear disaster in Fukushima has altered the ways in which we think about electricity and the environment. Electricity consumption has become political; "renewable energy" is now a buzzword for a sustainable future. Wind and solar farms are popping up with accelerated pace. Geothermal development, which had been overshadowed by nuclear-centered energy policy, is now booming. But there are also many challenges ahead. If nuclear and fossil fuel energy were stable, controlled and centralized, green energy is often dispersed, decentralized and susceptible to the caprice of nature. Further reliance on renewable energy, therefore, would demand alteration in consumption behavior, as well as careful monitoring and forecasting of energy sources and the development of "smart-grid" technologies to accommodate fluctuating power supply.
Renewable energy infrastructure opens our horizon to new dreams and fears. Its success will bring us closer to the future powered by a perpetual motion machine and the locally owned electricity. Its failure entails total black out, depletion of energy sources, and exploitation of local environment. Crisis narratives fuel the current drive for renewable energy as a solution to evade the catastrophic consequences of global warming and nuclear disasters. But the global environmentalism can also mask entrepreneurial ambitions and provide a pretext for environmental destruction in particular localities. The presenters of this panel explore the complex intertwining of the global and the local, technology, nature and human, and dreams and pitfalls of renewable energy development from the perspectives of anthropology and science and technology studies.
Accepted papers:
Session 1Paper short abstract:
Building on ethnographic work on collective efforts in Kyoto to redesign vernacular kyomachiya houses into new ‘hybrid’ eco-house formats, the paper discusses the role of shared ‘attachments’ to urban commonplaces in shaping contested processes of low-carbon infrastructural transition in the city.
Paper long abstract:
In recent years, work at the intersection of anthropology, urban political ecology, and science and technology studies (STS) have highlighted the role of large-scale infrastructures in mediating relations between local and global, technology and nature, in attempts to forge low-carbon cities for the future. While valuable insights have been provided on the distributed and contested socio-technical practices of low-carbon urban infrastructural transition, this paper argues that insufficient attention has so far been paid to the role of shared aesthetic sensibilities and 'attachments' in holding such practices together. The paper builds on ethnographic work on on-going collective efforts in Kyoto - engaging urban planners, architects, carpenters, home providers, solar panel companies, civic activists and consumers - of redesigning and repositioning a vernacular style of wooden housing known as kyomachiya into a 'hybrid' eco-house design, considered a locally appropriate response to the global challenges of climate change. Staging a debate between three prominent proponents of 'new French pragmatism' in social theory - Bruno Latour, Antoine Hennion and Laurent Thévenot - the paper develops a notion of attachment to urban 'commonplaces', and shows how this concept helps elucidate how and why particular architectural forms come to be promoted within urban infrastructural redesign processes. Amidst multiple controversies on the exact socio-technical adjustments called for by the new 'hybrid' eco-house design - including the role for decentralized energy production via rooftop solar panels - what ties this architectural 'cosmogram' together, the paper suggests, is a shared aesthetic attachment to the kyomachiya commonplace, imposing its own set of constraints.
Paper short abstract:
Focusing on the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant and the offshore windmills newly built in the adjacent water, this paper will examine the narratives of the future that are generated and renewed through the construction of energy infrastructure.
Paper long abstract:
By demolishing infrastructure, disasters ruin futures that were once built, while simultaneously allowing new futures to sprout from a broken landscape. Japan offers an example: three years after the massive tsunami that crippled the nuclear power plant—representing a future that Japan of the past had imagined—the nation is on its way to build a new future by constructing the world's largest wind farm off the infamous Fukushima coast. This grand project was initialized before the disaster by university researchers, but struggled to receive broader support. In the wake of the catastrophe, however, public concerns about radiation as well as government attempts to reconstruct the devastated region have generated tailwind for the alternative energy enterprise. There is a current pilot project to build three windmills by 2015, with the first of the three already completed in October 2013. Celebrating the region's new prospects, the project granted the windmill a name: "Fukushima Future" (Fukushima Mirai). Through analyzing the narratives of the future surrounding Fukushima and also historicizing them, this paper tries to draw what Jane Guyer (2007) has called "an ethnography of the near future" and examines the shifting but related narratives of the future in the past and the present. Moreover, by tracing the history of temporal momenta of energy infrastructures and by discussing previous and current narratives of the future, the paper suggests that the near future projected through the current wind farm is drawn from a future that was imagined in a particular past.
Paper short abstract:
This presentation explores how geothermal boom in post-Fukushima Japan is received in hot spring resorts near the development sites. Rsk to the hot spring resource serves as a stand-in for various suspicions including those against urban disregards for rural communities.
Paper long abstract:
Since the 2011 nuclear disaster in Fukushima, the initiative to develop renewable energy infrastructure has entered a new stage in Japan. One of the promising areas of development in this earthquake-prone nation is to utilize this geothermal energy for power generation. Japan has one of the largest reserves of geothermal energy in the world. However, its utilization has been minimal due to the government's emphasis on nuclear energy and various other technical and social difficulties. In particular, for decades, onsen (hot spring bath resort) communities have been wary of the geothermal energy development because of its unknown risk to the underground hot spring resource that they also use.
In this presentation, I follow Brian Larkin's call to pay attention to the "poetics of infrastructure" in addition to its politics. While Japan's geothermal boom is fed by the utopian vision of clean, sustainable, and nationally owned source of energy, the materiality of its infrastructures presents old dilemmas of industrial developments in rural Japan. Just as in other development projects, geothermal infrastructure brings environmental destructions and other visible intrusion to the local landscape. In particular, for onsen communities, the risk to their hot spring resource becomes a stand-in for various suspicions including those against urban disregards for rural communities. Meanwhile, in places like Tsumagoi of Gunma Prefecture, the dystopic narratives of dwindling population and rural demise has led some of its members to pin their hope on geothermal development as a way of invigorating local communities.