RGS 2014 Session: 'Narrating Energy'
Call for Papers: Royal Geographical Society with IBG Annual Conference, London, 27-29 August 2014.
Sponsored by the Energy Geographies Working Group (EGWG).
Organisers: Isla Forsyth (University of Nottingham) and Jennifer Rich (University of Nottingham).
Thrift (2005) has suggested that the twenty first century is one in which the world is being added to by a series of ‘intelligencings’, of ‘things’ that are hybrid and relational and through which the ‘background of being’ is changing radically. In no small part, the ways in which this experience of the world is being enabled and mediated is through a close relationship with, and reliance on, energy. In brief, our lives are saturated, driven, and directed by energy use. Overshadowing this reliant relationship, however, hang pervasive questions of unstable/sensitive geopolitics and unstable/sensitive environments. As such, there is an imperative to examine the heterogeneous relations and processes which produce, and are produced by, energy.
Yet, there are a number of troublesome features within the dominant discourse on energy. Firstly, it depicts science and industry as experts and the public as ‘consumer’, so that for the majority an engagement with energy is figured predominately through the economic, thereby shaping a narrative that disconnects people from other relationships with, or imaginations of, energy. Secondly, the scalar framing of this discourse is disjointed, presented either on the micro-scale of individual use and accountability or at the global scale of geopolitical insecurity and environmental uncertainty, which disempowers many from involvement in energy futures. Thirdly, it presents an ahistorical narrative with focus concentrated forward without consideration about what might be gained or learned in looking back.
This session seeks to critically explore cultural understandings of energy by examining particular spaces, places, sites, technologies, lives and landscapes. In doing so it will open dialogues on future energy relations and will place those relations within our individual and collective memories and lives.
Potential themes may include but are not limited to:
- Energy landscapes
- Sites, technologies, architectures and networks of energy production/consumption
- The aesthetics of energy production, transmission and consumption
- Energy and geographical imaginations
- Narrating and imagining energy pasts and futures
- Creative engagements with energy and power
Please send 250 word abstracts to both Isla Forsyth ([log in to unmask]) and Jennifer Rich ([log in to unmask]) by Wednesday 19th February 2014.
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