Presentation short abstract

This paper engages feminist urban political ecology to demonstrate how energy democracy organizers in the US South contest the appropriation of racialized social reproductive labor and chart an alternative imaginary for public power and affordable energy as part of a social wage.

Presentation long abstract

This intervention draws from ethnographic research on energy democracy organizing in Atlanta, Georgia and with the Knoxville Water and Energy for All coalition in Tennessee to consider how electric and water utility customers chart an alternative imaginary of public power systems in the US South. In response to the COVID-19 pandemic that heightened awareness of utility disconnections, energy and environmental justice organizations across the South formed or turned to focus on questions of racialized and gendered disparities in energy affordability and shut-offs. In this paper, I build on the analysis in my forthcoming book, Electric Life: Utility Regulation and the Fight for Energy Democracy, adopting feminist urban political ecology as a lens to study how utilities naturalize, invisibilize, and appropriate labor- and life-time. Here, I focus on the social reproductive labor that households undertake across everyday life to survive rising utility bills such as budgeting home water and energy usage, weatherizing homes, visiting charities, and applying for state assistance. Quotidian demands become collateral for speculative utility investment as utilities wager on customers' social reproductive labor to afford monthly bills. I ask how customers build solidarity and momentum to address regressive pricing by connecting these moments of everyday coping to longer histories of racialized discrimination that exacerbate disparities in affordability today. Contrasting two campaigns around a municipal utility in Tennessee and a regulated, investor-owned utility in Georgia, I demonstrate how organizing for affordable utilities drives at broader questions for democratic accountability and public investment in a social wage.