Energy Prospects: Between War and Peace

Today, energy becomes one of the central questions not only for politics, economics and environmental studies, but also for human and social sciences. It is a crossing point of various disciplines – philosophy, human and nonhuman geographies, material history, anthropology, cultural studies, or psychoanalysis. Energy humanities actively contribute to the multidisciplinary discussion of the future of the planet Earth and all its inhabitants. The question of energy extraction, transportation and consumption stands behind contemporary warfare and its geopolitical facades – from fossil fuel trade and failed energy transition, to the atomic thread reviving the ghosts of the Cold War and the new World War within the situation of global inequalities, climate change and the loss of biodiversity. The energy imaginary permeates ideological programs, political projects, national myths and mass media rhetoric. Energetic pasts and futures are reflected in public discourse, literature and film, where one can trace their historical and social contexts. The aim of our conference is to map this field of research. We are going to discuss humanitarian and social aspects of energy depending on its sources, such as fossil fuels, renewable energy and nuclear energy, and clarify their dialectics between war and peace.

Suggested questions: Extractive capitalism and fuel economies; Political economy and cultural politics of energy Fossil fuels: petropolitics and petrocultures; Infrastructure of energy flows: geopolitical interests and sociocultural guidelines; Intangible aspects of material energy resources; Sustainability, renewability and energy transition in today’s ideology; Nuclear energy for war and peace; Energetic scenarios for the apocalypse: climate change, mass extinction, nuclear war.

Please register here.

Keynote speakers:

Cara Daggett is an Associate Professor in Political Science at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Virginia and a Senior Fellow at the Research Institute for Sustainability in Potsdam, Germany. Her research explores energy and ecological politics through an intersectional feminist framework. She is particularly focused upon interrogating global North attachments to productivity and intensive energy use, and more recently, on envisioning what feminist energy systems could look like. Her book, The Birth of Energy: Fossil Fuels, Thermodynamics, and the Politics of Work (Duke, 2019), was awarded the Clay Morgan Award for best book in environmental political theory, and the Yale H. Ferguson Book Award from the International Association Northeast. She has also published in peer-reviewed journals including Environmental Politics, Energy Research & Social Science, Millennium: Journal of International Studies and the International Feminist Journal of Politics.

Imre Szeman is Director of the Institute for Environment, Conservation and Sustainability and Professor of Human Geography at the University of Toronto Scarborough. He is co-founder of the Petrocultures Research Group, which explores the socio-cultural dimensions of energy use and its implications for energy transition and climate change, and the founder of the After Oil Collective. Szeman is author (most recently) of On Petrocultures: Globalization, Culture, and Energy (West Virginia University Press, 2019) and Futures of the Sun: The Struggle Over Renewable Life (University of Minnesota Press, 2024). Power Shift: Keywords for a New Politics of Energy (co-edited with Jennifer Wenzel) will be published in 2025. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada.

All speakers: Cara Daggett, Imre Szeman, Jeff Diamanti, Darin Barney, Gretchen Bakke, Alexander Klose, Maria Engström, Oxana Timofeeva, Ilya Kalinin, Benjamin Beuerle, Tatiana Mitrova, Tatiana Lanshina, Angelina Davydova, Felix Jaitner, Oldag Caspar ‍

---

For more information, e-mail [email protected].

Time: 9:30 am – 7:00 pm CET/GMT+1

Location: Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin Haus Unter den Linden Theodor-Fontane-Saal (Unter den Linden 8, 10117 Berlin)