Just Powers Podcast

In this episode we will be reading Sheena Wilson’s 2018 article titled “Energy Imaginaries: Feminist and Decolonial Futures,” which can be found in Materialism and the Critique of Energy, edited by Brent Ryan Bellamy and Jeff Diamanti.

Materialism and the Critique of Energy brings together twenty-one theorists working in a range of traditions to conceive of a twenty-first century materialism critical of the economic, political, cultural, and environmental impacts of large-scale energy development on collective life. In Wilson’s contribution, she outlines the current barriers to energy transition and the need to expand and deepen energy literacy in order to help us collaboratively imagine and collectively move toward socially just—decolonized and feminist—energy futures.

“We currently find ourselves at an impasse, unsure about how to transition to less carbon-intensive energy systems on the scale and within the timeframes required by the climate crisis. This energy impasse is the political, economic, and environmental deadlock created by the limits of Western ontologies and epistemologies that need to be newly thought. The task ahead is daunting, but is also rich with possibility. Instead of thinking of impasse as simply a “foreclosure of possibility,” it can be understood (as we in the After Oil collective have argued) as a moment of “radical indeterminacy…in which we might activate the potential obscured by business-as-usual…This moment is the transition to a society after oil. […] Creative energy solutions of all varieties — social, economic, political, techno-scientific — are being stymied by Western worldviews, which inevitably define the contours of our systems, social realities, and, therefore, in many cases, the limits of our imaginaries. How people embark on an energy transition in different local communities and at a global scale has the potential to either intensify the inequities that have been generated by oil-fuelled capitalism, or allow for the reintroduction of other non-patriarchal, non-Western ontologies erased by histories of conquest and domination in the interest of profit. Feminist, Indigenous, decolonial, and anti-capitalist visions for caring newly and differently for our ecologies can in turn create ecologies of care” (Wilson, 2018, 378-379).

The book is available online as a PDF for free here, and is also available through Amazon print-on-demand.

This Read & Record episode features a selection of chapters from Isabelle Stengers’ 2015 book In catastrophic times: Resisting the coming barbarism. The book was translated from French to English by Andrew Goffey and published by Open Humanities Press in 2015.

In Catastrophic Times offers a welcome intervention into the current state of global political impasses and ecological catastrophe by outlining the cumulative impacts of global warming as a series of crises that will not “pass” before everything goes back to “normal.” As Stengers outlines through various examples—pollution, the poison of pesticides, the exhaustion of natural resources, falling water tables, growing social inequalities—the possibility of a global climate crisis is now upon us, in turn requiring new strategies and tactical experiments that are capable of seizing environmental issues and sociotechnical problems as political questions in order to resist the ‘coming barbarism’.

“The epoch has changed: fifty years ago, when the grand perspectives on technico-scientific innovation were synonymous with progress, it would have been quasi-inconceivable not to turn with confidence to the scientists and technologists, not to expect from them the solution to problems that concern the development they have been so proud to be the motor of. But here too – even if it is less evident – confidence has also been profoundly shaken. It is not in the least bit ensured that the sciences, such as we know them at least, are equipped to respond to the threats of the future. Rather, with what is called the “knowledge economy,” it is relatively assured that the answers that the scientists will not fail to propose will not allow us to avoid barbarism” (Stengers, 2015, p. 29).

The full book is available to download for free online. Open Humanities Press (or OHP) is an international community of scholars, editors and readers with a focus on critical and cultural theory. By partnering with a number of groups and institutions, OHP acts on the principles of access, scholarship, diversity and transparency in order to explore grass-roots solutions to the crisis in Humanities publishing.

Reference: Stengers, Isabelle. (2015). In catastrophic times: Resisting the coming barbarism. (A. Goffey., Trans.) London: Open Humanities Press.

In this episode we will be reading “Indigenous Women and Knowledge” by Isabel Altamirano-Jimenez & Nathalie Kermoal. This text is featured in Living on the Land. Indigenous Women’s Understanding of Place, also edited by Isabel Altamirano-Jimenez & Nathalie Kermoal and published through Athabasca University Press in 2016.

Living on the Land examines how patriarchy, gender, and colonialism have shaped the experiences of Indigenous women as both knowers and producers of knowledge. From a variety of methodological perspectives, contributors to the volume explore the nature and scope of Indigenous women’s knowledge, its rootedness in relationships both human and spiritual, and its inseparability from land and landscape.

“The contributors to this book, the majority of whom are Indigenous, aim at grounding Indigenous women’s knowledge in the land both historically and presently. They also explore the ways in which Indigenous women have resisted colonial attempts to assimilate and subordinate them. The chapters in this book represent Indigenous women’s experiences beyond their domestic role and insists on connecting them to a variety of tasks within and beyond the household. To this end, the book aspires to prevent the continued neglect of Indigenous women’s knowledge and contribution to their peoples and society at large. We do not mean to suggest by our emphasis on women’s knowledge of land that women’s participation in the production of knowledge is limited to the land and territory. Others have challenged prevalent representations of Indigenous women’s domesticity by demonstrating how their work and labour have contributed to their urban households and communities’ economy while subsidizing the market sector (Williams 2012). We do not theorize Indigenous knowledge as a practice either. Instead, the purpose of this book is to highlight the diversity of women’s experiences by exploring and examining the lives of women as they are evidenced in oral history, interviews, economic processes, and life histories.” (Altamirano-Jimenez & Kermoal, 2016, p. 4-5).

The full book is available to download for free online. Founded in 2007, Athabasca University Press is Canada’s first open-access scholarly press and is committed to bringing the work of emerging and established scholars to the public.

Reference: Altamirano-Jimenez, Isabel & Kermoal, Nathalie. “Indigenous Women and Knowledge”. In Living on the Land. Indigenous Women’s Understanding of Place. Isabel Altamirano-Jimenez & Nathalie Kermoal, editors. Edmonton: Athabasca University Press, 2016.

This episode features a ‘Read + Record’ of the introductory chapter to Alexis Shotwell’s 2016 book “Against Purity: Living Ethically in Compromised Times”. In Against Purity, Alexis Shotwell proposes a powerful new conception of social movements as custodians for the past and incubators for liberated futures. Against Purity undertakes an analysis that draws on theories of race, disability, gender, and animal ethics as a foundation for an innovative approach to the politics and ethics of responding to systemic problems today.

“In this book, I argue against purism not because I want a devastated world, the Mordor of industrial capitalism emerging as from a closely aligned alternate universe through our floating islands of plastic gradually breaking down into microbeads consumed by the scant marine life left alive after generations of overfishing, bottom scraping, and coral reef–killing ocean acidification; our human-caused, place-devastating elevated sea levels; our earth-shaking, water poisoning fracking; our toxic lakes made of the externalities of rare-earth mineral production for so-called advanced electronics; our soul-and-life destroying prisons; our oil spills; our children playing with bits of dirty bombs; our white phosphorus; our generations of trauma held in the body; our cancers; and I could go on. I argue against purism because it is one bad but common approach to devastation in all its forms. It is a common approach for anyone who attempts to meet and control a complex situation that is fundamentally outside our control. It is a bad approach because it shuts down precisely the field of possibility that might allow us to take better collective action against the destruction of the world in all its strange, delightful, impure frolic. Purism is a de-collectivizing, de-mobilizing, paradoxical politics of despair. This world deserves better.” (Shotwell, 2016, p. 8-9)

The introduction, titled “Complexity and Complicity: An Introduction to Constitutive Impurity” appears in Against Purity: Living Ethically in Compromised Times by Alexis Shotwell, and was published in 2016 by the University of Minnesota Press. This text is read by permission of the author and the publisher. You can find more information and purchase the text here.

Reference: Shotwell, Alexis. Against Purity: Living Ethically in Compromised Times. Minneapolis/London: University of Minnesota Press, 2016.

This Read & Record episode features Zoe Todd’s 2015 article “Indigenizing the Anthropocene”. This article is featured in Art in the Anthropocene: Encounters Among Aesthetics, Politics, Environment and Epistemology, edited by Heather Davis and Etienne Turpin and published through Open Humanities Press in 2015.

In Todd’s article, she insists on an ethical relationality with Indigenous Peoples and philosophies as both a necessary starting point for processes of decolonization, and as a move away from the conditions that created the Anthropocene, including the notion of the Anthropocene itself.

“There is no way to get around the fact that the business of making knowledge and making art in the European and North American academies is still very much a Eurocentric endeavour. But I would offer: An effective art of the Anthropocene is one that directly engages with the structural violences of heteropatriarchy and white supremacy as they shape discourse and praxis. This is where the work of Indigenous scholars and artists promises to speak back, reshape, and change the direction of current human-centric and Eurocentric framings of the Anthropocene. I now attend to the promise of Indigenous praxis and thought as decolonizing tools in the Anthropocene.” (Todd, 2015, 248-249).

The full book is available to download for free online. Open Humanities Press (or OHP) is an international community of scholars, editors and readers with a focus on critical and cultural theory. By partnering with a number of groups and institutions, OHP acts on the principles of access, scholarship, diversity and transparency in order to explore grass-roots solutions to the crisis in Humanities publishing.

Reference: Todd, Z. (2015). Indigenizing the Anthropocene. Pp. 241-254 in Art in the Anthropocene: Encounters Among Aesthetics, Politics, Environment and Epistemology. Heather Davis and Etienne Turpin, editors. Open Humanities Press.