Paper Short Abstract:

This paper explores the lived realities of energy poverty in the Czech Republic during the 2022 energy crisis, driven by energy company collapses, the pandemic, and the war in Ukraine. Through ethnographic research, it examines grassroots mutual aid initiatives, particularly solidarity insulation brigades (zateplovací brigády) organized by Energie Lidem, a coalition advocating systemic solutions. These brigades teach and share insulation techniques, fostering networks of solidarity that challenge neoliberal framings of energy poverty as an individual failure. By situating energy poverty within frameworks of slow violence (Nixon 2011) and infrastructural violence (Rodgers/O’Neill 2012), this study highlights its entanglement with systemic crises, such as inadequate housing, regional disparities, and socio-economic inequalities. It demonstrates how collective action transforms understandings of energy poverty, disrupting dominant narratives while rendering visible the intersecting structures of harm that perpetuate it.

Paper Abstract:

This paper examines the lived realities of energy poverty in the Czech Republic during the 2022 energy crisis, driven by energy company collapses, the pandemic, and the war in Ukraine. Surging energy prices pushed over half of Czech households into financial distress, reflecting a broader European crisis in which 34 million people face energy poverty, contributing to tens of thousands of excess winter deaths annually.

Through ethnographic research, this study explores grassroots mutual aid responses, focusing on solidarity insulation brigades (zateplovací brigády) organized by Energie Lidem, a coalition advocating systemic solutions. These brigades teach communities basic insulation techniques, which participants then share further, fostering networks of solidarity that challenge neoliberal framings of energy poverty as an individual failure. This collective action reframes energy poverty outside narrow, official definitions, revealing its entanglements with interconnected crises, including inadequate housing, racialized marginalization, regional healthcare disparities, and systemic inequalities.

By situating energy poverty within the frameworks of slow violence (Nixon 2011) and infrastructural violence (Rodgers/O’Neill 2012), this paper aligns with the panel’s focus on “unwriting.” It illustrates how collective initiatives transform understandings of energy poverty and its solutions, while uncovering the broad range of intersecting factors that produce and perpetuate it. In doing so, the study highlights the potential of grassroots responses to disrupt dominant narratives, rendering visible the systemic harms and structural crises that cannot be addressed in isolation.