Deadline: 12/1/24
Contact: Victoria Googasian, Georgetown University in Qatar
Email: energyhumanities@georgetown.edu
Panel CFP for the ASLE 2025 Biennial Conference, July 8-11 in College Park, MD.
Energy studies often invokes an infrastructural imaginary characterized by brute physicality: pipelines, power stations, and extractive megaprojects. The effects of these physical structures on colonized bodies are physical and tangible: the coal dust that coats the bodies of workers, the oil slick that spreads across the body of the planet. For that reason, we likewise imagine the linked work of transition and decolonization as a physical labor of dismantling and rebuilding, an effort to contend with an almost overwhelming inertia. But energy systems also operate in and through the realm of the intangible, the invisible, and the microscopic: from micrometer-scale particulate matter to radioactive ions to less prosaic intangibles such as affect or even magic. Though invisibility can lead to erasure, we note that these unseen qualities of energy are uniquely open to re-appropriation and re-narration in decolonial thought and storytelling—precisely because they must be actively made present to us through the work of representation. To take but a few examples, Samia Henni documents the lingering radiation from French nuclear testing in the Algerian Sahara as a felt yet invisible form of toxic coloniality (Henni 2024). At the same time, Jennifer Wenzel reminds us, this very radiation forms the basis for what Franz Fanon describes as the “atomic disintegration” of the European project in his conclusion to The Wretched of the Earth (Wenzel, forthcoming). Gabrielle Hecht, likewise, shows how efforts to contend with radioactive uranium contamination after the fall of South Africa’s apartheid regime offered residents of informal settlements a means to contest their own treatment as political waste after the fall of apartheid (Hecht, 2023). And in her “Volcano Manifesto,” artist Cauleen Smith imagines that the very atmosphere that buoys the private jets of billionaires might become the element that expels these same billionaires from the earth’s biosphere (Smith 2022). It is their atmospheric intangibility that allows radiating particles, volcanic gasses, and other unseen elements of our energy systems to serve both colonial and insurgent purposes.
This panel, which will take the form of a roundtable or paper jam (depending on the number of accepted contributions) seeks to better theorize the invisible and intangible aspects of energy systems, specifically as they are taken up and re-narrated in decolonial projects. We invite contributions that explore these themes through literatures, arts, films, archives, and theories of decoloniality. Our aim is to facilitate an interdisciplinary discussion.
Interested participants should submit an abstract of no more than 250 words and a 150-word bio to energyhumanities@georgetown.edu by Dec. 1, 2024. We will notify selected participants by Dec. 15, prior to submitting the proposal to the ASLE selection committee.
If accepted, this panel will be sponsored by Georgetown University in Qatar’s Program in Energy Humanities, as part of our ongoing research cluster on energy and decoloniality.
Posted on October 14, 2024
