Keynote Speakers
Alexander Dunlap (Boston University)
Confronting the “Green” in the Energy-Extraction Nexus: Moving Beyond Energy Binaries for Rigorous Research & Political Action
Abstract: Delving into the (renewable) energy-extraction nexus, this presentation confronts the implicit myth that hydrocarbon extraction is separate from wind, solar and other lower-carbon energy infrastructures. This entails examining the problem of climate and environmental politics that, among other issues, has normalized a series of propaganda terms that continue to obstruct not only research, but how we perceive energy systems within statist and capitalist societies. Speculating on shifts within hydrocarbon extraction companies, moving from opposition to lower-carbon energy systems to integrating into diversified investments, the energy-extraction nexus is unpacked. The presentation then shifts to discuss green mining and militarism. In addition to changing our language with how we discuss energy systems, this presentation argues that greening has only served to disrupt and confuse real efforts at sustainable development or socioecological transformation. Recognizing current developmental trends and militarism, this lecture seeks to guide research agendas to promote postdevelopment and real socioecological transformation towards planetary respect and harmony.
Alexander Dunlap has recently finished a project at Boston University Institute for Global (2023-2026), USA, and a docent at Global Development Studies Department, University of Helsinki, Finland. Their work has critically examined police-military transformations associated with market-based conservation, wind energy development and extractive projects more generally in Latin America, Europe and the United States. The last three years, they have examined the life cycle of solar panels on the ground followed by investigating two more critical raw material mines with the, then named, US National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL). Xander has written five books, among them This System is Killing Us: Land Grabbing, the Green Economy & Ecological Conflict (Pluto Press), which reviews their first ten years of research in environmental conflicts over megaprojects. Email: alexander.a.dunlap@helsinki.fi
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Jordan B. Kinder (NYU Steinhardt)
Situating the Situations of Energy: Doing Energy Humanities in Non-Renewable Times
Abstract: What does it mean to do energy humanities in the current conjuncture? What does it looks like? And what early conceptual frameworks hold up (or not), for whom, and why? Thistalk will return to fundamental conceptual frameworks that informed early interventions in the then-emergent field of the energy humanities to reflect on their place in critical work today practiced under non-renewable conditions not of our choosing. Staying close to the energy infrastructures that have been the focus of my own research in what is now called Canada--pipelines, megadams, and data centers--the talk will jump between an overview of my research and its conclusions as well as a metacritical situating of energy's situation and the situations of energy today.
Jordan B. Kinder is Assistant Professor in Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University and author of Petroturfing: Refining Canadian Oil through Social Media (University of Minnesota Press, 2024). He is a citizen of the Métis Nation of Alberta with roots in the Willow Bunch Métis Settlement in southern Saskatchewan.
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Kathryn Yusoff (Queen Mary University of London)
Geocide: Colonial Earth Rubrics and Anti-Imperial Geopower
Abstract: In this talk I will introduce the term “geocide” as a tactic of imperial earth practices to capture geologic materials to subtend ‘capital on the move’ towards concentrations of power and the transformation of the geosphere. I begin with a discussion of the methodological approaches to geopower, situating geological materialities within the political ascendancy of the historic agency of the “over-developed world”. I argue geophysics is the dominant and on-going paradigm of life that has been instituted (and institutionalized) through colonialism, grounded in the separation and deadification of the inhuman. The rubric of geopower is addressed through the scalar ambitions of imperialism in its repetition of infrastructures (epistemic and geophysical) and the colonial settlement of these earth practices within the geophysical fabric of the earth. I concluded by addressing the question of the amplification of anti-colonial geosocial arrangements and the politicisation of minoritarian interventions against geocide. In the fog of destruction via imperial geophysics, how might the partially realised histories of Pan-African eco-socialisms and the solidarities of anti-imperialisms formed in the historic context of Independence and Tricontinental movements, point to other possible earth politics? And how might the social mutation of theory into geophysics disrupt the grammars of materialisms to launch a different horizon of earth practices?
Kathryn Yusoff is Professor of Inhuman Geography at Queen Mary University London. As a transdisciplinary geographer, Kathryn understands the inhuman as a place from which to think about earthly relations and inhumane histories. Theoretically, Kathryn engages historical, geophilosophical and black feminist methods to speak to issues of environmental change, empires of geologic practices and the politics of planetary state to examine the role of inhuman epistemologies in race, gender, and subjectivity for more equitable environmental world-buildings. Kathryn is the author of A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None (University of Minnesota Press, 2018) and, most recently, Geologic Life: Inhuman Intimacies and the Geophysics of Race (Duke University Press, 2024).
More information on special events coming soon.