Format/Structure

We intend to have four presentations in a single session. We would like 2 sessions and invite six to eight paper presentations on this theme.

Long Abstract

Labour continues to be an important component of energy as well as mineral extractive regimes. Labour thus needs to be at the centre of discussions around energy transitions. Planning for post-fossil futures tends to define ‘labour’ as workers employed in specific energy-related sectors and the aligned industries. However, communities in regions dependent on coal and the energy sector in the Global South navigate life between formal and informal economies, between agrarian, land-based livelihoods, temporary jobs within the energy and mining sectors and the informal coal economy and other non-farm employment.

The process of imagining fossil free futures could be reinvigorated by engaging with the diversity of labour and labouring particularly prevalent in the Global South. We invite scholarship on energy transition trajectories in the Global South that engage specifically with ‘pluriactivity’ , precarity and informality of lives and livelihoods . This panel hopes to bring in voices, concerns and aspirations of industrial workers as well as forest and land-based communities into energy transition narratives by focusing on the broader framework of ‘labour’ rather than a ‘trade’ and on multiple forms of existing precarity.

We encourage papers that engage with labour activism pertaining to coal transitions in the Global South. The panel in turn also proposes to examine the challenges of bringing in environmental concerns and the urgency of fossil free alternatives into the practice of organised labour. In the process, we seek to explore the possibilities of reimagining not just ‘labour’ but equally trade union ‘praxis’ and the nature of organisation of workers in the coal and energy sectors. We encourage a critical look at the possibilities and challenges of imagining fossil free futures rooted in lived experiences of the various forms of work and working in the Global South in the specific context of energy transitions.

This Panel has 4 pending paper proposals.
Propose paper