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Call for contributions: 18th Annual Critical Geography Conference: Constructing a radical politics in an age of crisis Clark University, Worcester, MA, November 4-6, 2011 Energy and the crises of capitalism Although energy crises have occupied the popular and academic imagination since the early 1970s there has been little, if any, conceptualization of energy crises as specifically capitalist crises, and more broadly, conceptualization of energy in relation to crises of capitalism. The upcoming critical geography conference at Clark University, with its provocative theme "Constructing a radical politics in an age of crisis", offers a great opportunity to come together and think about the relations between energy and the crises of capitalism and the construction of radical, material politics. If you're working on this theme or any theme related to this topic and would like to participate, or if you've had some ideas buzzing in your head for some time and would like to test them on a crowd of critical geographers basking in a New England autumn, send me an abstract (you chose the number of words) by 5 August at [log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>. I plan to extend this discussion to next year's AAG meeting in New York if there's enough interest in the question of energy and crisis; so even if you're not planning to attend the critical geography conference at Clark but have something you'd like to develop for the AAG meeting, please send me an email indicating interest. All conceptual and theoretical approaches are welcome but preference, at this stage, is given to (shorter) contributions that elaborate ideas challenging existing views on energy (and crisis and political practice). Those could address any of the following themes (and others not included here that are relevant to the topic and the theme of the conference) in any combination, at any scale and in any empirical-historical context: Energy crises as crises of capitalism; Energy and crises of accumulation; Energy and crises of regulation; Energy and crises of social reproduction (metabolism); Energy derivatives: contradictions of energy as money; Energy forecasting and the politics of space-time; Uneven development of the energy mix: substitution dynamics, energy transitions, etc; Uneven development of world energy markets: global governance, financial flows, etc; Uneven geography of nuclear energy — or meltdown in Japan, moratorium in Europe, enrichment and Stuxnet in Iran; Uneven geography of sink functions: waste as site of accumulation, waste as site of crisis; Science and technology as capital: Efficiency/intensity, clean fuels, etc; Energy and the ecological crisis: climate change, spills, nuclear fallout; Convenient truths: the limits of capitalism with an environmental face; Alternative, renewable, sustainable: new bubbles? Energy and modernity: crises of progress and everyday life; 5-hour energy drinks, the working day and the exploitation of labour in the new economy; Energy as an aesthetic problem — or, do you really fancy wind farms?; Energy and biopolitics; Obesity as energy crisis; Energy and the legitimation crisis of the bourgeois state; Energy and crises of security: terrorism, nuclear proliferation, etc; The (geo)political uses of scarcity — "peak everything": omg or lol? Biofuels and food: land use/land cover change, agrarian economies, hunger, land grabs, etc; Energy, poverty and inequality; Energy and radical politics: resistance, protest, uprising (in relation to any of the above); Fighting capitalist energy; Energy against capitalism; Energy beyond capitalism; …