Andrea Muehlebach
online
Extractivism and Transition Research Online Dialogues
Once every month on Thursdays, from March to September 2021
In order to implement the Paris Agreement and keep global warming ‘well below 2°C’, the world has to transitions to low-carbon energy futures. This impacts resource extraction as well as grid systems; it influences established industries, trade routes and relations and adjunctive infrastructures. Being both target and determiner of politics, energy production and its related industries and infrastructures are reshaping societies. They have become internal to climate and environmental policy requiring low-carbon energy transitions, implying the need to balance ecological, economic, industrial, social and political needs, moral rifts, uncertainties and planetary necessities.
Attempts to govern transitions, laboratories for emission mitigation through digital or other regulatory approaches, or broader conceptual and financial plans to foster infrastructural changes are often made or installed in or with relation to cities – albeit not exclusively so.
Urban industrial entanglements become sites of endurance or renewal, where the postindustrial vision is confronted with infrastructures engrained in industrial age. Paying particular attention to these industrial and urban contexts of energy-related transition processes, we invite social science scholars to discuss, exchange and further develop research on post-carbon futures, energy, and infrastructures.
The CityIndustries network (https://cityindustries.org) joins the Extractivism and Transition Research Online Dialogues this summer term. This allows us to draw particular attention to the relation between cities, industries and energy in times of transformation, to these once or prospective powerful centres. We will invite an academic every month to discuss one of her/his papers with the group. The roughly 90 minute session will be a format to particularly render concepts more precisely and to critically engage with transformation theories related to energy production and consumption, resource extraction, industrial infrastructure and their ecological interlinkages, environmental consequences and transformation processes.
We invite everyone willing to join the discussion – based on reading a text of the ‘speaker’, which will be send to you – to sign up via email to katja.mueller@zirs.uni-halle.de.
Organisers Katja Müller (MLU Halle), Asta Vonderau (MLU Halle), Andreas Streinzer (Goethe
Uni Frankfurt), Siarhei Liubimau (EHU Vilnius), Felix Ringel (Durham Uni), Kerstin Poehls (Uni Hamburg)
In cooperation with ZIRS (Centre for Interdisciplinary Regional Studies), CityIndustries,
DGSKA Europa, dgv Ethnographies of the Political, EASA’s Energy Anthropology Network