Category Archives: energy humanities

Energy Policy Today

Energy Policy Today: The Environment, the Economy, and Contemporary Politics


April 12, 2017 at 1pm Battelle-Tompkins 228

 

 

 

Many companies and sectors are reevaluating their carbon footprint. They are seeking alternate ways that incorporate the use of sustainable energy. With growing populations, the declining access to other natural resources and the repercussions of having exhausted them, the future of energy has become a highly discussed and challenging topic.

 


 

About Our Speaker:

 

Claire Brunel is an assistant professor at American University. She is particularly interested in
providing empirical evidence of the links between environmental policies and international competitiveness. For example, she asks whether policies that encouraged the use and the development of renewable energies in the OECD led to an increase in domestic innovation and manufacturing, or rather to a rise in the licensing and importing of foreign technologies. Other works examine the role of the offshoring of polluting industries in emissions reductions of EU and US manufacturing and how to measure the stringency of environmental policies.

 

 

 

 


Claire Brunel not only sees the intersection of environmental economics and international trade, she continues to seek new information that points to it. Brunel recently collaborated with Georgetown Professor Arik Levinson on a project that measured the stringency of environmental regulations. The project examined whether regulations in the U.S. contributed to policies regarding investment, labor demand and international trade. Her current work pertains to the progress and study of solar panel subsidies, the co-benefits of environmental regulations in the U.S. and trade diversification patterns of developing countries.

 

Car Culture in Africa

Join us for a lecture by Professor Lindsey Green-Simms (Department of Literature, American University) on how luxury cars and car culture inform notions of cultural and social mobility  in Africa.


Cruising the Petro-state:  Car Culture and Nigerian Cinema

Wednesday November 2, 2016, 1 pm, at 228 Battelle-Tompkins Hall

 

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This talk examines car culture and the status of the private automobile in post oil-boom Nigeria by reading popular video films that are a part of the now-famous “Nollywood” industry.  In particular, it will discuss how luxury cars like the Hummer or Mercedes Benz are paradigmatic and contradictory objects through which one can assess both the pleasures and anxieties of global modernity in Nigeria.  Though these cars are highly coveted objects, typically filmed driving down paved roads in posh neighborhoods, they are often a sign of wealth that is acquired through criminality, witchcraft, magic, or fraud.  Any discussion of car culture therefore requires an engagement with the complexities of the moral economy of Nigeria and assessment of what it means to be a capitalist consumer in a highly stratified oil-producing country.

 

 


About our speaker

Green-Simms-Lindsey-300Lindsey Green-Simms’ teaching and research focuses on African and post-colonial film and literature. Her particular interests include globalization, technology, gender and sexuality studies, and Nollywood video-film production. Professor Green-Simms’ forthcoming book, Postcolonial Automobility: Cars, Cultural Production, and Global Mobility in West Africa, examines how the contradictions of globalization are embedded in the commodity of the automobile and in the ideals of automobility. She is also working on a second book, provisionally titled Unbelonging Bodies: Same-Sex Sexualities and African Screen Media. Professor Green-Simms completed her doctorate in Comparative Literature at the University of Minnesota, and has previously taught at Duke University, where she was a postdoctoral fellow in Women’s Studies, as well as at the College of Charleston. She has published articles in Camera Obscura, transition, Journal of African Cinemas, and Journal of Postcolonial Writing and has book chapters in Viewing African Cinema in the Twenty-First Century (Ohio U. Press) and Indiscretions: At the Intersection of Queer and Postcolonial Theory (Rodopi Press).

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Read more:

Lindsey Green-Simms, “Hustlers, Homewreckers, and Homoeroticism: Nollywood’s Beautiful Faces”
PDF: Hustlers_Homewreckers_and_Homoeroticism
Lindsey Green-Simms, “Occult Melodramas: Spectral Affect and West African Video-Film”
PDF: Occult_Melodramas_Spectral_Affect_and_W


 

Understanding Fuel

What can critical theory, literature, and film help us understand about fuel?

Join us for a lecture by Professor Karen Pinkus (Department of Romance Studies, Cornell University) on the concept of “fuel” in western culture and philosophy, and the ways in which our understanding of energy has structured modernity.


Fuel: History of a Strange Concept

Monday September 26, 2016, 1 pm at 228 Battelle-Tompkins Hall

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In this talk, professor Pinkus will discuss the concept of fuel in human culture and philosophy, from antiquity to the present day.
Part of her new book, Fuel: A Speculative Dictionary (University of Minnesota Press, 2016), the talk examines different types of fuel, from everyday fossil and renewable fuels to fantastical fuels found in science fiction and speculative literature. This work was inspired by professor Pinkus’ concern about the environment, and her sense that that the humanities can bring a critical research component to solving the problems of climate change.
Pinkus uses tools from the humanities, such as critical theory, philosophy, and literary analysis, to separate fuel from energy, and to examine our relationship with fuel itself. Is fuel a form of pure potentiality, that is, power, but before it is used (up)?  She proposes that fuels are materials that have “very complex relationships with our own thought structures, fantasies, narratives, or ways of being in the world.”

 

Cultures of Energycultural-histroy-of-climate-changeFind out more:

Listen to a podcast about her work on Cultures of Energy, where she talks about Jules Verne as her greatest inspiration, her new research on geoengineering, and why the future belongs to small people.

Read an article she recently published in the new collection The Cultural History of Climate Change, titled “Fuels and humans, bíos and zoe”

Read and download the PDF here: pinkusculturalhistory

 

 


About our speaker

pinkusKaren Pinkus is Professor of Italian and Comparative Literature at Cornell University.  She is also a member of the Advisory Board of the Atkinson Center for a Sustainable Future, and a member of the Climate Change Focus Group. She has published many articles on topics ranging from literary theory and the internal combustion engine to the temporality of carbon management. Professor Pinkus has published widely in Italian culture, literary theory, cinema, visual theory, and environmental theory.  Aside from Italian she also works with French, Latin, German, Spanish, and is learning Swedish.

She has several ongoing research projects:
1) a new book tentatively titled Autonomia/ Automata: Machines for Writing, Laboring and Thinking in 1960s Italy, that explores issues around labor, automation and repetition in Italian art, literature, design, and film of the 60s.  In part, this work is in dialogue with contemporary Italian thought, especially as regards the question of the Autonomia movement, the refusal to work, and the question of wages.

2) Her new book Fuel (November 2016) thinks about issues crucial to climate change by arguing for a separation of fuel (perhaps understood as potentiality, or dynamis, to use the Aristotelian term) from energy as a system of power (actuality, use).  Fuel follows a series of literary, filmic, and critical texts through the form of a dictionary (from “air” to “zyklon D”).  Fuel engages with literature, art and critical theory as they are central to analogy and in turn, to fuel itself.

For about the past ten years, most of her work has been directed toward thinking about the humanities in relation to climate change. Professor Pinkus is on the editorial boards of diacritics and World Picture Journal. For diacritics, she edited a special issue on climate change criticism (43.1), thirty years on from the influential issue on nuclear criticism.

You can find out more about Karen Pinkus on her website

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Have a look at Karen Pinkus’ books:

pid_16330How can we account, in a rigorous way, for alchemy’s ubiquity? We think of alchemy as the transformation of a base material (usually lead) into gold, but “alchemy” is a word in wide circulation in everyday life, often called upon to fulfill a metaphoric duty as the magical transformation of materials. Almost every culture and time has had some form of alchemy. This book looks at alchemy, not at any one particular instance along the historical timeline, not as a practice or theory, not as a mode of redemption, but as a theoretical problem, linked to real gold and real production in the world. What emerges as the least common denominator or “intensive property” of alchemy is ambivalence, the impossible and paradoxical coexistence of two incompatible elements. Alchemical Mercury moves from antiquity, through the golden age of alchemy in the Dutch seventeenth century, to conceptual art, to alternative fuels, stopping to think with writers such as Dante, Goethe, Hoffmann, the Grimm Brothers, George Eliot, and Marx. Eclectic and wide-ranging, this is the first study to consider alchemy in relation to literary and visual theory in a comprehensive way.

51PW1EWHY7L._SX388_BO1,204,203,200_Early on a windy morning in April 1953, the body of a young woman washed up on a beach outside of Rome. Her name was Wilma Montesi, and, as the papers reported, she had left her home in the city center a day earlier, alone. The police called her death an accidental drowning. But the public was not convinced. In the cafés around the Via Veneto, people began to speak-of the son of a powerful politician, lavish parties, movie stars, orgies, drugs.

How this news item of everyday life exploded into one of the greatest scandals of a modern democracy is the story Karen Pinkus tells in The Montesi Scandal. Wilma’s death brought to the surface every simmering element of Italian culture: bitter aspiring actresses, corrupt politicians, nervous Jesuits in sunglasses, jaded princes. Italians of all types lined up to testify-in court or to journalists of varying legitimacy-about the death of the middle-class carpenter’s daughter, in the process creating a media frenzy and the modern culture of celebrity. Witnesses sold their stories to the tabloids, only to retract them. They posed for pictures, pretending to shun the spotlight. And they in turn became celebrities in their own right.

Pinkus takes us through the alleys and entryways of Rome in the 1950s, linking Wilma’s death to the beginnings of the dolce vita, now synonymous with modern Roman life. Pinkus follows the first paparazzi on their scooters as they shoot the protagonists and gives us an insider’s view of the stories and trials that came to surround this lonely figure that washed up on the shores of Ostia. Full of the magnificent paparazzi photos of the protagonists in the drama and film stills from the era’s landmark movies, The Montesi Scandal joins true crime with “high” culture in an original form, one true to both the period and the cinematic conception of life it created. More than a meditation of the intricate ties among movies, paparazzo photography, and Italian culture, The Montesi Scandal narrates Wilma’s story and its characters as the notes for an unrealized film, but one that, as the reader discovers, seems impossible to produce.

 

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Profane Energies / Sacred Narratives

How does religious thought inform and affect environmentalist activism? Join us for a lecture by Evan Berry (Department of Philosophy and Religion, American University), on the role of faith traditions in framing debates about climate change.


Profane Energies/Sacred Narratives

                 On Religion and Environmentalism

Wednesday February 15, 2017,  1 pm at 228 Battelle-Tompkins Hall

In the run up to COP21, the international convening that produced the Paris Agreement on climate change, religious leaders and indigenous communities were important contributors in framing a global moral call to action. Yet hardly one year later, climate politics again seem intractable; many religious groups, especially here in the United States, remain skeptical about climate science. In this talk, professor Berry draws from his work on  the relationship between nature and religious thought in order to elucidate recent cultural and political debates.

 


About our speaker

Evan Berry is Associate Professor of Philosophy and Religion at American University and Co-Director of the Ethics, Peace, and Global Affairs master’s program. His research examines the intersections among religion, globalization, and climate change, and seeks to advance knowledge about the role of religious actors in contemporary environmental controversy. Beginning with the premise that religion and religious ideas serve to locate human beings in the natural order, his scholarship concentrates on the cultural particularities of environmental ethics—the ways that different religious perspectives generate divergent ecological orientations. Pursuing these questions through both ethnographic research and philosophical reflection, his current work includes a study of religious civil society groups actively engaged with the challenge of climate change. His book, Devoted to Nature: The Religious Roots of American Environmentalism, was recently published by the University of California Press.

 

 

 

 

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Screen Shot 2016-06-26 at 10.03.33 AMEvan Berry’s recent book, Devoted to Nature, explores the religious underpinnings of American environmentalism, tracing the theological character of American environmental thought from its Romantic foundations to contemporary nature spirituality. During the Gilded Age and the Progressive Era, religious sources were central to the formation of the American environmental imagination, shaping ideas about the natural world, establishing practices of engagement with environments and landscapes, and generating new modes of social and political interaction. Building on the work of seminal environmental historians who acknowledge the environmental movement’s religious roots, Evan Berry offers a potent theoretical corrective to the narrative that explained the presence of religious elements in the movement well into the twentieth century. In particular, Berry argues that an explicitly Christian understanding of salvation underlies the movement’s orientation toward the natural world. Theologically derived concepts of salvation, redemption, and spiritual progress have not only provided the basic context for Americans’ passion for nature but have also established the horizons of possibility within the national environmental imagination.

 

 

Follow Evan Berry:   @ecothought

After Oil

How can we imagine a transition to new energy sources? Join us for a lecture by Professor Imre Szeman (University of Alberta) on the way interdisciplinary perspectives can inform our understanding of energy uses and forms. Drawing from his work in the field of Energy Humanities, Professor Szeman will explore the social, cultural, and political changes needed to make possible a full-scale transition from fossil fuels to new forms of energy.


After Oil 

Tuesday, November 15, 2016, 3 pm at 228 Battelle-Tompkins Hall

AfterOil

 

About our speaker

IImre Szemanmre Szeman is Canada Research Chair in Cultural Studies and Professor of English and Film Studies at the University of Alberta, and Adjunct Professor of interdisciplinary Studies at OCAD University. He conducts research on and teaches in the areas of energy and environmental studies, literary and cultural theory, social and political philosophy (esp. 19th and 20th left theory, globalization and nationalism), and Canadian studies. Szeman is the recipient of the John Polanyi Prize in Literature (2000), the Petro-Canada Young Innovator Award (2003), the Scotiabank-AUCC Award for Excellence in Internationalization (2004), an Alexander von Humboldt Fellowship (2005-7), the President’s Award for Excellence in Graduate Supervision at McMaster University (2008), a Killam Annual Professorship (2013), and the J. Gordin Kaplan Award for Excellence in Research (2015), the U of Alberta’s most prestigious research award that recognizes research excellence in humanities, social sciences, law, education and fine arts. He is the founder of the Canadian Association of Cultural Studies and a founding member of the US Cultural Studies Association. He is currently finishing up work on On Empty: The Cultural Politics of Oil.

You can find out more about Imre Szeman on his website

Please Click on the link below for a full download of Imre Szeman’s book After Oil :

PDF: After_Oil

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Have a look at Imre Szeman’s books and articles:


A Companion to Critical and Cultural Theory
culture/imre offers a fresh perspective on both familiar and under-theorized questions and topics animating the field of contemporary critical and cultural theory. It provides a full account of the history and scope of the field, focusing on the most pressing questions and problems that occupy and impel contemporary theoretical discourse. Gathering together some of the most widely read and innovative theorists working today, this Companion offers thirty-nine essays designed to illuminate the topics that dominate theoretical debate today and, we anticipate, for some time to come. By framing its chapters around the problems and issues animating the field today, A Companion to Critical and Cultural Theory offers a theoretical framework within which crucial questions, traditions, approaches, and concepts in critical and cultural theory take on newly generative valences. Capturing the dynamism of contemporary theory, the essays collected in this book will provide a comprehensive account of the ways in which the study of literature and culture has been, and continues to be challenged and energized by critical and cultural theory.
Contemporary Marxist Theory: An Anthology brings together major texts in late twentieth century Marxist thought, focusing on work written Marx/Imreduring the past two decades since the fall of the Berlin Wall. It takes as its point of departure the strong sense that—contrary to rumours of its death in conjunction with the end of state socialism—the influence and impact of Marxist theory is today stronger than ever, and has become even more essential for understanding our historical conjuncture than during the Cold War. The crisis-ridden world produced by global capitalism requires theoretically sophisticated and critically sharp analyses of political and economic systems and structures, and of the social and cultural imaginaries which inflect and shape their formation. It is impossible to ignore the fact that the voices dominating critical and cultural theory in the past two decades have belonged to thinkers identified with the ideas of Marxist thought and its intellectual heritage. This book fills a significant gap in the contemporary world of ideas by showcasing an area of scholarly analysis whose impact on intellectual thought and political action will only grow in coming years.

 

 

 

 

 

Please click on the book title below to learn more about Imre Siezman’s works: 

9780847693887    9780801868030   978-0-8223-4416-2_pr   9780823273911