New Infrastructures for Energy Transition

Seminar

Datum
08.05.2018 16:15 - 18:00

Organisator(en)
Joint Institutes Colloquium, MPI for Social Anthropology and Institute for Social and Cultural Anthropology, MLU

Vortragende(r)
Elaine Forde, Swansea University, UK

Ort
Main Seminar Room

Beschreibung
The term energy transition denotes a growing consensus about the pressing need for energy culture change. This entails seeking alternatives to fossil fuels and extractive energy sources, to reach the overall goal of a transition to a low-carbon economy. Whether driven by security, price, ethical considerations or other factors, the issue of energy transition is acute, however the act of making such a transition is constrained by a full range of socio-technical factors.
This paper interrogates the convergence of socio-technical factors in combinations which produce infrastructural inequalities. Transformative energy research needs to pay a particular attention to everyday energy cultures which exist under conditions of infrastructural inequality, where idealised energy behaviours are understood, negotiated but not enabled. I argue that uneven access to energy infrastructures is one of the primary challenges in securing energy justice for people and planet, and with that in mind I pose the question: What new infrastructures will emerge to support and enable energy transition on a global scale?
Coupled to the need to meet the challenge of energy transition is the important question of research ethics and the problematic notion of intervention to demand change to existing practices. One particular problem is that the transition discourse is framed in positive, progressive language which elides the experience of differently-configured energy subjectivities. While “choice” in the context of energy provisioning might be largely a conceit of consumers in urban centres and affluent sections of high-income and 'post-industrial' countries, the implications of energy choice are felt far more broadly.
The global future of fuel emerges from the here and now, but this baseline is not one of commonality. As such this paper presents ethnographic data from a broad range of sources to draw tentative conclusions. A prolonged and engaged period of ethnographic research into living off grid in rural areas of west Wales is contrasted with relatively shorter and distilled ethnographic engagements with people living under conditions of infrastructural inequality both in the UK and equatorial Sao Tome et Principe. In formed by these locations, this paper explores emerging technical, social and political infrastructures that promise to unsettle dominant, but increasingly contingent, “business as usual” energy cultures. (Speaker's abstract)




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