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- Convenors:
-
Thomas E. Bell
(University of Kent)
Ly Lõhmus (University of Kent)
Miguel Alexiades (University of Kent)
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- Format:
- Panel
- Sessions:
- Thursday 9 June, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
We critically examine modes of envisioning the future in response to the Anthropocene's human-environmental crises. How do technology, justice, responsibility, epistemology, and political agency intersect in visions of transformation? How do such visions problematize the category of the human?
Long Abstract:
The Anthropocene heralds a perilous epoch of intersecting human-environmental crises. It is also an epoch in which political actors, in a wide variety of contexts, are demanding systemic transformation of societies according to shared moral visions of potential futures. As such, the unravelling crises of the Anthropocene are reshaped as opportunities to morally imagine and to politically construct better worlds, in the present and into the future.
Such visions are often laden with mixtures of uncertainty, contradiction, and incommensurability as situated actors grapple with the difficulty of (re)imagining future worlds in an epoch that throws into question the structural arrangements, ontological conditions, and epistemologies foundational to modernity. This becomes particularly apparent in political attempts to (re-)configure the relationship between knowledge, technology, capital, power, and justice.
We invite contributions that critically examine, and lay grounds to compare, different modes of envisioning how the future should and could be in response to the cascading human-environmental crises of the 21st century. Indicative questions include:
- How do technology (including energy-, cyber-, nano, and bio-technologies), justice, responsibility, epistemology, and political agency intersect in demands for systemic transformation?
- How do visions of transformation problematize categories and binaries constitutive of modernity, such as nature/culture, life/non-life, human/non-human, and technology/biology?
- What kinds of political subjectivity and organization underpin, and are generated by, attempts to actualize potential futures?
- How does future-envisioning intersect with problems of race, class, and identity politics, governance and citizenship, and colonialism?
Papers are welcomed from all regional specialisms and disciplines.
Accepted paper:
Session 1 Thursday 9 June, 2022, -Paper short abstract:
The emergence of digital platforms for energy provisioning enables new forms exchange of (green) energy for consumers. Based on interviews, observations and future-envisioning workshops in an Energy Living Lab, we show how platforms enable and complicate the notion of being an energy citizen.
Paper long abstract:
The recent emergence of digital platforms for energy provisioning enables new forms of access to and exchange of (green) energy for consumers. Such new ways of hooking up to the grid may problematise existing energy practices and facilitate new ones. In this paper we examine how platforms are becoming a means for people to engage with energy and the energy system, thus allowing new enactments of energy citizenship. We draw on interviews, observations and future-envisioning workshops in the context of a virtual power plant demonstration project in Amsterdam. In this project, a collective of local households with solar panels and home batteries pooled their resources for energy trading, local energy exchange and grid balancing. We map the way this energy platform constrains and enables the energy practices of its users, and discuss the notions of energy citizenship it thereby promotes and frustrates. We show how people’s existing practices of monitoring and timing energy use are disturbed by the new, automated layer of energy exchange. At the same time, the platform made people aware of new issues such as grid balance and energy equity, and thereby enabled and complicated the notion of being an energy citizen in a transformed energy system.