You are invited to the AAA 2021 Annual Meeting panel, “The Green Frontier: Critical Perspectives on Energy Transitions.” The panel is open to all and will be accessible through this Zoom link (Meeting ID: 931 5876 9092). The panel description and detailed program are below. We hope to see you there!
The Green Frontier: Critical Perspectives on Energy Transitions November 18, 202110:15 AM – 12:00 PM (Eastern Time)AAA 2021 Annual Meeting
Chair: Mark GoodaleDiscussants: Cymene Howe and Dominic Boyer
As the collective transition from fossil fuels to cleaner energy forms becomes increasingly accepted and desired due to the pressing crises of climate change, a growing number of governments and companies are adopting green energy solutions. These range from wind and solar energy projects to lithium extraction and nuclear energy endeavors while it remains unclear if these so-called “green transitions” will represent a significant break with the structures of carbon capitalism that enabled the climate crisis in the first place. Recent ethnographies have shown how green energy projects replicate similar dominant political, social, and economic patterns through which coal and oil-powered energy systems have depended upon, and they continue to reproduce both extractivist logics and the local and planetary inequalities in the so-called post-carbon age. In this panel, we aim to critically engage with post-carbon and/or green energy assemblages. We are especially interested in how green energy projects replicate and/or diverge from carbon-based forms of energy and the ways in which such transitions involve the concerns of local communities over sovereignty and livable worlds. “Introduction: Toward a Critical Anthropology of Energy Assemblages”Mark Goodale “Freedom and Fuel: How Fossil Fuel PR Shapes Green Transition Narratives” Cara Daggett “The Oceanic Frontier: Offshore Gas Fields, Extractivism, and Geo-Political Futures in a Divided Cyprus”Zeynep Oguz“Solar What?! Struggling with Carbon Logics in Post-Carbon Design”Jamie Cross “Sovereign and Dignified” Extraction in Bolivia: Regional Encounters with Nationalized Lithium Industrialization”
David Luis Schröter
DiscussionCymene Howe and Dominic Boyer