Format/Structure

This panel seeks to center the ‘lived experiences’ of utility natures.

Long Abstract

Political ecology has advanced critical understandings of financialization and its pernicious effects on water and energy sectors, yet the ‘lived experiences’ of water and energy provision are seldom considered in tandem. Why? What can we learn from the lived experiences of water and energy struggles? What shapes peoples’ experiences of utility natures? What lines of commonalities and difference can we draw across these two sectors? How might political ecology provide fresh insights into their broader dynamics? In an era of increasing inequality, wracked by crises in household social reproduction and (un)affordable living, what forms of struggle and insurgency have emerged in response?

This panel seeks to center the ‘lived experiences’ of utility natures by bringing together perspectives that reveal the interwoven relations of water, energy, and finance. We welcome presentations that advance critical theoretical and/or empirical knowledge about the experience, logics, governance, politics, and/or struggles of utility natures.

We encourage papers that draw connections among different utility natures and consider the benefits and/or challenges of bringing these areas of scholarship together to understand, contest, and potentially transform the financial lives of water and energy. Topics of interest may include:

• Utility poverty and its lived experiences

• Financial subjectivities and the multi-scalar role of fiscal infrastructures

• Techniques of financial discipline–such as utility shutoffs–and their impacts on households

• Utility shutoff moratoriums and their legal and critical geographies

• State and private utility governing and/or value-grabbing logics

• Racial capitalism and utility natures; legacies of racialized and class-based urban planning and struggles in energy and/or water poverty

• Platform capitalism and the role of digital technologies that mediate and govern utility natures

• Financialization of life’s essential services and their cascading effects

• Critical approaches to assistance programs

• Utility natures and household adaptation to climate change and extreme weather

This Panel has 5 pending paper proposals.
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