James Adams doing field research near New Orleans for the Quotidian Anthropocenes project, fall 2019.
Join us in the Anthropology Department conference room (SBSG 3200) or through Zoom: https://uci.zoom.us/j/93623748525
See below the themes that James will address. See this ecent publication https://www.publicbooks.org/petro-ghosts-and-just-transitions/
The event will be informal. Everyone is welcome.
Austin, Texas -- the focus of Adam's research on energy transition -- during the February 2021 Texas grid failure.
One of the main arguments in the dissertation will be that the whole concept of “energy transition” is rooted in the epistemological error of thinking in terms of discrete "energy systems,” rather than as a system that is open to an ecology of other open systems. Using Bateson, I stress the way technological systems, including but not limited to energy systems, intersect and articulate with other socio-natural systems to produce a unique ecology of social, mental, and environmental processes. Changes in relations between processes–emerging as a complex of gaps, frictions, synchronizations, and feedback loops–make the ecology more vulnerable to disarticulation and disaster. Thus, the full ecology of scales and systems must also be considered and accounted for in order to develop a nuanced approach to sociotechnical change like energy transitions.
Some systems are more autonomous or flexible and easier to transition than others that are more deeply entrenched. For instance, even though there are difficulties in bringing in renewable technologies, this is easier done than changing modes of perception, practice, and desire that both precede and have taken new shape through these technologies. Ethical plateaus account for how certain systems are targeted for transition above others. In Austin, the energy ecology is still characterized by petroculture, which was, itself, constructed through settler colonialism and racialized social differences. In seeing the petroculture as an outgrowth of these earlier ethical plateaus, the root of the problem of climate change shifts from technologies for the extraction and combustion of fossil fuels to the colonial relations to the land and the racial capitalist evaluations of difference that made this extraction possible and this combustion meaningful.
Because it is this ecology of discrete-yet-interconnected systems that we are transitioning, there will be no single, seamless transition, but rather multiple, disjointed transitions. Systems at each scale present their own unique challenges because they require different forms of maintenance, and are differentially resilient due to unique intersections and articulations with other systems, including those that have been conscripted into extant regimes and apparatuses of power. Thus, part of what my dissertation shows is how progress in this renewable energy transition has been more continuous and consistent at certain levels, while its progress has wavered, inched forward, stalled out, and actually lost ground at other levels. Thus, part of what good energy/environmental governance needs to entail is the cultivation of more intensive and cross-cutting forms of coordination and collaboration.