In this episode of Volatile Trajectories, you’ll hear from Darin Barney, Walter Gordon and Bob Johnson about how they define and defy the boundaries that exist between the interior and exterior of the university.

Show less

In this episode of Volatile Trajectories, you’ll hear from Rhys Williams, Stacey Balkan, and Tommy Davis about how their hope for “revolutionary forms of infrastructure,” to guard against disastrous futures and quickly accelerating climate collapse, hinges in certain ways on both an “aesthetic education that centralizes conversations about more hopeful futures” and moving beyond merely imagining alternatives to doing the political work necessary to bring them into being.

Show less

In this episode, you’ll hear from Emily Eaton, Eva-Lynn Jagoe, Scott Stoneman, Mark Simpson and Penelope Plaza about our relationships to the places we know and care about, and about our discrete approaches to breaking the spell of fossil capitalism, petroculture, oil — the dominant energy regime of our time.

Show less

In this episode, you’ll hear from Allan Stoekl, Sarah Marie Wiebe, Casey Williams, and Imre Szeman about the political structures that constrain the collective agency required to combat climate change. It’s hard to summarize this expansive discussion, but it can maybe be captured best by three words: pleasure, solidarity and sacrifice—words that contain entire worlds.   

Cara New Daggett, Swaralipi Nandi and Jennifer Wenzel about alternative models of climate action that centre care and critical thought.   

Cara Daggett is a political theorist who teaches at Virginia Tech. Her research on feminist approaches to science and technology, and her writing on the politics of energy and the environment, has been extremely impactful. Her book The Birth of Energy and her writing on what she’s influentially called “petromasculinity” aren’t just widely cited, but serve as a guide for thinking about the problem of energy. 

Swaralipi Nandi is an Assistant Professor of English at Loyola College. Her work involves energy humanities in the context of India, exploring questions of a colonial past, environmentalism of the global South, and diasporic labour in the oil fields of the Gulf.  She’s the editor of The Postnational Fantasy: Essays on Postcolonialism, Cosmopolitics, and Science Fiction and Spectacles of Blood: A Study of Violence and Masculinity in Postcolonial Films. 

Jennifer Wenzel is a professor of postcolonial theory and environmental and energy humanities at Columbia University. Her books include Bulletproof: Afterlives of Anticolonial Prophecy in South Africa and Beyond and The Disposition of Nature: Environmental Crisis and World Literature.  

In this discussion you’ll hear Jennifer, Swaralipi and Cara work through a certain “cultural preference for… heroic action,” and critically consider the question of degrowth as a messy, complicated and consequential way of thinking around the catastrophe of relentless fossil fuel consumption.   If, as Jennifer puts it, our “dreams and expectations” are “attached to the energy regimes of the present,” what different sort of “everyday are we fighting for?” Can more “daring” stories and more “chaotic” experiments stave off the seemingly inevitable amnesia that allows the current system to persist? If we have all the ideas and technologies we need, then what is missing?

Graeme Macdonald, Terra Schwerin Rowe and Hiroki Shin discuss the practice of “futuring,” or engaging with speculative futures, and think through how it might operate as a kind of corrective to what Terra terms the “domino effect” narrative of climate catastrophe.

Graeme Macdonald is Professor in the Dept. of English & Comparative Literary Studies, University of Warwick. His recent work includes an edited collection of Science Fiction Studies on "Food Futures” and one on Energy, Ecology and Climate in 21st Century Scottish Literature. 

Terra Schwerin Rowe is Associate Professor in the Philosophy and Religion Department at the University of North Texas. Her research has focused on Protestantism, environmentalism, and capitalism, but her more recent research looks at Christianity, intersectionality, and extractivist energy cultures. Keep an eye out for her new book, which is entitled Of Modern Extraction: Experiments in Critical Petro-theology. 

Hiroki Shin is a historian of energy, transport and the environment. His research explores past energy transitions by considering energy markets, resource politics, and infrastructure, but also by thinking about consumer culture and everyday practices.

Their conversation covers a lot of ground. They are interested in imagining methods for building a museum as both a conceptual and material set of artifacts and stories, because they share a sense that this space can motivate people to think about moving beyond petroculture. Hiroki talks about his sincere concern for the ways that, in many established museum spaces, people are sort of “taken in” by existing technology. In relation to this, Terra asks: “what is the future of the impossible?” If the modern museum reinscribes some notion of the “technological sublime” of fossil-fueled industrialism, can it also be fitted to the possibility of a massive energy transition in the present and into the future?