Making and Meeting Online: A White Paper on E-Conferences, Workshops, and Other Experiments in Low-Carbon Research Exchange

Academics fly a lot: to research sites and archives, to conferences and workshops. Yet flying has many negative repercussions. Air travel has disproportionate climate impacts, and for reasons of time, money, and border security, produces many barriers for marginalized scholars, shaping who is able shows up at conferences and thus, who participates in the conversations that define a community of study. Forms of knowledge exchange that do not depend on aviation are thus urgently needed. E-conferences offer on such possibility. As scholars of media and energy, and as e-conference organizers and participants ourselves, we wrote this white paper to highlight what’s worked in the past, what hazards lie ahead for the future, and what potential gains could be won in the present. We hope our words will be useful to small conference organizers and professional associations alike. Our aim is not to end in-person meetings but rather to foster effective low-carbon alternatives that can help reduce the amount of travel necessary to participate in global knowledge communities. Meeting together in person is invaluable, but we can augment it with effective alternatives through critical reflection and smart design choices. We aim to spark further reflections and innovations in collaborative experiments in digital research exchange - or even other forms of scholarly community. We hope such experimentation continues long after the pandemic is over, and that its effects will shape the university for the better

Energy In/Out of Place

This book, and the online workshop that preceded it, are attempts to intensify the sense of place within our scholarship and in our scholarly practices. They are formed from the efforts of five research teams examining energy cultures in five different locations around the world. Team members weren’t necessarily experts on their given places, but many were bound to these sites through time, kith, and kin

Energizing the Right: Economy, Ecology, and Culture in the 1970s US Energy Crisis

Taking up Janet Roitman’s charge to think critically about the epistemology of crises, this dissertation is an interdisciplinary cultural history of the 1970s “energy crisis” in the United States. It asks how a crisis of energy came to be, how different experts and interests interpreted its meaning, and how it has shaped US political culture. My central claim is that the energy crisis fostered neoliberalism in the United States by cultivating speculative discourses about energy futures that ultimately supported free market trade and energy policies by the early 1980s. Indeed, the energy crisis itself was always largely speculative, concerned with the possibility of greater scarcity in the future, and it generated competing visions of the future that ultimately moved the country further to the economic right. But this story is not just about the market. It is also about the ecological critiques of carbon capitalism that the energy crisis inspired and the ways in which they both challenged and overlapped with neoliberal formations. I first explore the evolution of the energy crisis as a historically specific assemblage that was only possible in the 1970s. I then consider the political flexibility of the crisis by tracing competing interpretations of its meaning. This theme continues in a chapter on the conservation ethic – a widely proposed solution to the energy crisis that excoriated the waste inherent in the American “way of life,” but for competing ends. Neoliberalism enters the story in my final chapters, which consider how “car films” valorized the white neoliberal subject through unfettered auto-mobility, and the establishment of oil futures contracts as a free market solution to the energy crisis. My interdisciplinary approach broadens the historiography of the energy crisis to consider the concepts, meanings, affects, and practices that comprised it, providing deeper context for the policy and geopolitical concerns that other scholars explore. I conclude that the articulation of a “crisis” was an insufficient foundation upon which to build a large scale energy transition.Ph.D.2019-12-19 00:00:0