Call for Papers

What’s New Again? Energy Infrastructures, Resistance and Authoritarian Populisms

 

Ethemcan Turhan (KTH Royal Institute of Technology)

Magdalena Kuchler (Uppsala University)

There is an urgent need to rethink energy infrastructures –old and new- in a carbon-constrained world drifting rapidly towards authoritarian neoliberal and populist varieties of capitalism. These infrastructures fuel powerful socio-technical imaginaries that underpin visions of modernity, neo-industrialisation and national developmentalism. A critical focus on the temporal-spatial advance of specific energy infrastructures together with wider socio-environmental, cultural, political, and economic effects are therefore crucial in a moment when critical human geography together with other strands of critical social sciences and humanities are witnessing an ‘infrastructural turn’. From mega-renewable infrastructures to renewed interest in transnational pipelines to fracking to smart grids, energy infrastructures are again at the intersection of democracy, justice, equality and sustainability debates. Following this line, we are interested in exploring how different forms of infrastructural power, interests and top-down energy initiatives interact or are interwoven with authoritarian populism vis-à-vis the potentially exclusionary and latent constellations, representations of ‘the regional’ and ‘the local’. We are equally interested in exploring how energy democracy (decentralization/re-nationalization) may provide us with analytical and normative tools to dismantle current and future fossil fuel ‘strongholds’ by bringing forth the various loci of contestation and resistance, as well as trade-offs and opportunities associated with such initiatives from spatial and temporal perspectives.

 

We are calling for paper presentations (15 min each + 30 min Q&A) with transdisciplinary accounts of democratic resistance to contemporary populist/nationalist fossil fuel energy forces and investment trends along the extraction, transmission, conversion, consumption and waste steps of energy infrastructures both from the global North and South – accounts that would unpack the black-box of the nationhood and technocracy today. In a nutshell, this session will bring together scholars/activists to think collectively on networked, multi-scalar and multi-actor resistance to energy infrastructures under the global wave of authoritarian populism. We are planning to suggest a special section for a leading open access journal in the field from the presentations in the session.

 

Interested colleagues are invited to send abstracts of 250 words to Ethemcan Turhan (KTH), [log in to unmask] by 14^th October 2018, the latest.

 

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Ethemcan Turhan, Ph.D.

KTH Royal Institute of Technology

Environmental Humanities Lab

Division of History of Science, Technology and Environment
Teknikringen 74D, SE-100 44 Stockholm, Sweden

Recent publications:

*Towards a political ecology of EU energy policy (2018)

*Energy infrastructure and the fate of the nation: Introduction to special issue, Energy Research and Social Science (2018)
*Examining new geographies of coal: Dissenting energyscapes in Colombia and Turkey, Applied Energy (2018)
*A perspective on radical transformations to sustainability: resistances, movements and alternatives, Sustainability Science (2018)