Papers
Pantea Armanfar, Moss Berke, Kate Foster (RE-PEAT collective)
Resonating the Never-Over Past of Peatlands
Wetland soil specimens at the Dutch World Soil Museum profile saturated ecologies formed over several thousand years. Earlier work by Foster contextualised these desiccated ‘monoliths’ in the cultural landscapes of peat extraction. Co-work by Armanfar and Foster adopts listening as a method to perceive the overlaid and fluid assemblages of peat, whose thin living layer overlies depths of vegetal remains. A determination to unfix chrononormative and human-centred paradigms is accompanied by speculative dialogue with dead, silenced, and unborn beings .Our multimodal presentation articulates how attention to wetlands’ ecology can help re-imagine grief as a ‘vital and necessary task for living though the Anthropocene’. As members of the collective, RE-PEAT, our purpose is to develop ‘transformative narratives around people and peatlands’ (iv). Emotional care accompanies RE-PEAT’s advocacy work. Together, we discuss how creative co-work can direct the resonance of dispersed peatland remains towards multi-species healing.
David Atkinson, Anne Bevan, Jen Harland, Dan Lee, Antonia Thomas
TRANSECTS – Coastal Communities and Energy Transitions
The Transects project addresses marine energy sources and their past, present and future cultural impacts and resonance. We address 18th-19th century whaling, 20th-century offshore oil extraction and the contemporary growth of offshore wind-power generation off the Eastern and Northern coasts of Britain. We explore the shifting use of these resources and how the transitions between them were understood and negotiated at the time. We also consider how these lessons might inform current energy developments, and how creative methods might offer different, more sensitive and sustainable ways to conceptualise and manage marine energy sources and their possible futures. Using place-based and participatory methods including archaeological and archival research, participatory mapping, walking workshops, and collaborative creative practice, the project aims to help coastal communities explore their roles and responses to energy transitions through time.
Moss Berke
The Ongoing Grief of Boglands: Re-interpreting Ecological Grief with Lessons in Sympoiesis and Wetland Ecology
This paper explores boglands as thinking-partners to reimagine ecological grief outside pathologizing, humanistic frameworks. Boglands reveal ecologically-situated models for living in death saturated environments, demonstrating that loss need not be processed-through and overcome, but that continued presence of the dead is crucial for interdependent ongoing survival.
Generatively troubling conceptions of death, boglands point towards possibilities for similarly troubling grief. Learning with/from bogs, this paper offers a multi-disciplinary reframing of ecological grief wherein it is understood as “sympoiesis” (Haraway 2016) with the dead which disrupts chrononormative regimes by integrating ‘pasts’ into knotted presents and futures. While previous scholarship established nature’s grievability, this paper contends that understanding nature as grievable doesn’t necessarily intervene in ecocide, if grief itself
Remains untroubled. Therefore this presentation moves towards reworking grief through multi-species collaboration and ecological specificity. May we learn to live grief as an act of carrying-forward, bringing the dead to their rightful place(s) as participants crafting alternative climatic futures.
Belén Cerezo
Affective documents or when photographs of other beings help us to think-feel life
This paper analyses and reflects on the photographic project The Oldest Living Things in the World by American artist Rachel Sussman, which focuses on creating an archive of the planet’s oldest organisms. By examining this work’s relationship with scientific knowledge and its continuous evolution, this research explores how artistic practices involving images can foster new ways of feeling-thinking in viewers, leading to shifts in behaviour within a socio-political context where imaginaries play a fundamental role. It also proposes the notion of the “affective document” to examine how works of art function and their capacity to affect (us); this concept is based on a review of the etymology of the term document. In summary, this study investigates the potential of art to affirm and celebrate life—interconnected, interdependent, and multispecies—while challenging the perception of nature as a resource to be exploited or dominated.
Edward Christie
Towards a Theory of Petromodernism: An Analysis of Shell-Mex and BP Limited’s Commissioning of the British Avant-Garde in the 1930s
In recent years, there has been a proliferation of protests against the funding of cultural establishments by oil corporations, including landmark campaigns such as Liberate Tate. Such interventions with modern and contemporary art museums are underpinned by the assumption that divestment from fossil fuel industries would effectively disentangle the relationship between culture and oil. Instead, my paper argues that a more rigorous analysis of the influence of petroleum on artworks themselves is necessary to substantively challenge the role that art has played—and continues to play—in promoting the oil industry. To support this stance, I focus on Shell-Mex and BP Limited’s advertisements from the 1930s, which commissioned leading figures of the British avant-garde, as a case study to reinterpret the formal vocabulary of modernism and its enduring influence on contemporary art as stemming from the influence of petroleum.
Laura Donkers
Drawing Climate Change Together: helping bi-cultural communities express the uncertainty of living in places that are changing
As we witness daily news of climate change there is an urgency to understand its emotional impacts through exchange between communities and cultures. Art can help to focus perspectives. Socially engaged approaches especially can empower people to express complex emotional experiences about living in places that are changing. Participatory drawing offers to the participant a visual form of ‘being heard’ that can yield insights across bi-cultural communities. In November 2023, the Hokianga Community Drawing Project deployed the creative agency of collective drawing to explore impacts that locally experienced extreme weather events might be causing to people’s property, travel plans, infrastructure, supply chains and livelihoods. A visual conversation occurred between communities located to the north and south of the Hokianga ferry link in Northland, Aotearoa New Zealand. This drawing project drew the communities together to uncover lived experience connections between people, place and location at a time of climate crisis.
Kate Downie, Gillian McFarland, Rehema White, Benjamin Ong
Relational paradigms: activism, art and academia in Fife communities
Separation and specialism threaten to disconnect people from each other, from places and from nature. Relational paradigms offer hope and practical opportunity to gather communities and create spaces to make [a difference]. The aim of this paper is to analyse motivations and consequences of the art practice ArtMovesFife. This artist led initiative connects people, place and planet; seeking post-fossil fuel prosperity on the old coal fields; in the shade of woodland cultural histories. Our 400+ subscribers include more than 200 artists, community members and external actors. Activities include artist gatherings, co-production of local art, shared journeys on the 64 Bus, the Levenmouth train, adaptive map making workshops, and provocations on regenerative farming at Go Falkland. All this has developed an equation of looking, a growing community who traverse possibilities for the future, disruptive modes of thinking, creating and action. As ArtMoves leaves Fife, we offer transgressive engagement between art, activism and academia.
Jessica Enevold Duncan, Josefine L. Sarkez-Knudsen
A Tale of Two Homes: Two Tales of Climate Change
“It was the best of 8mes, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness…” Dickens’ 1859 novel famously begins. A google-search would tell you it is about the French revolution and two men falling in love with the same woman with very different outcomes. Our tale is about climate change and two families falling in love with their envisioned home, with very different understandings of their love. Dickens establishes a co-existence of extremes, in his case, poverty and wealth in France. Here, we present two examples from 1) fieldwork of grass-root responses to crisis prioritizing permacultural principles for homemaking and 2) a media study of reality-TV featuring families pursuing their house dreams, to illustrate how seemingly similar entities (white, heterosexual, privileged) operate with completely distinctive epistemologies of climate change while working towards a comparable goal – creating a home and future.
Léna Ferrié
Reimagining landscapes of energy and extraction through experimental photobooks: Towards a poetic-scientific aesthetics
This paper provides an exploration of three experimental, intermedial photobooks which focus on different sites of energy and extraction including fracking fields, petrochemistry, and marine renewable energy: Shale Play. Poems and Photographs from the Fracking Fields by Julia Spicher Kasdorf and Steven Rubin (2018); Petrochemical America by Richard Misrach and Kate Orff (2012); and Ebban an’ Flowan by Alec Finlay, Laura Watts, and Alistair Peebles (2015). The publications serve as investigations; they incorporate photography, poetry, and scientific data, as well as both human and nonhuman voices and agencies, opening up spaces for possible futures. This paper seeks to examine how these collaborative endeavours reimagine epistemologies of climate change and representations of energy. Together, they delineate a landscape aesthetics oscillating between poetry and science, art and technology, affect and speculation.
Ronja Charlotte Frank
“Wild Girls and Wolves:” Energy, Ideology, and the Transformative Power of Subscendence in Tomm Moore and Ross Stewart’s Wolfwalkers (2020)
Set during the Cromwellian conquest of Ireland, Tomm Moore and Ross Stewart’s 2020 short film Wolfwalkers highlights the lasting impact of colonial-imperial deforestation practices on Ireland’s present-day ecological landscapes. Drawing on Dominic Boyer’s concept of “infrastructural ecology” and on Timothy Morton’s critique of “agrilogistic” thought, my paper examines how Wolfwalkers uses animation as a medium to explore the imbrication of energy and social systems in different concepts of human-nonhuman relationality. By integrating narrative and visual modes of storytelling, I argue, Wolfwalkers juxtaposes a transcendent ideology of imperial improvement and expansion with a subscendent understanding of humanity’s place within the more-than-human world. In doing so, it not only problematizes the petrocultural insistence on “[m]obility, expansion, and expenditure” (Boyer 56); it also demonstrates that a shift towards more just and sustainable energy systems necessitates an ideological move towards a sense of solidarity and community that exceeds geographic and conceptual boundaries.
Nataya Friedan
Slick Futures; Speculative Fiction in the American Oil and Gas Industry
As humanity careens into an increasingly unlivable future to the drum beat of “drill, baby, drill,” from the United States, industrial visions of the future detach from climate evidence and experience into ever more elaborate forms of speculative fiction. In Texas, a series of more and worse rain events including Hurricane Harvey inspired apocalyptic thinking in the oil and gas industry, only the apocalypse was not the climate catastrophe, but the end of oil. This paper draws on ethnographic fieldwork in Houston between 2018-2020 as the business community laboured to maintain optimism in the face of industrial damnation. This optimism relied explicitly on magical thinking, understood through Reagan’s famous phrase, “the magic of the market.” By considering market ontologies in ethnographic terms, contemporary climate misinformation can be considered one episode of speculative fiction among many that have characterized the production of value and the distribution of wealth around oil.
Samuel Jude Gaffney
Encountering an Extractive Frontier
Political ecology scholars describe capital’s reproduction as co-constituted by the expansion of extractive frontiers. Prototypically, these frontiers are places where resources are torn from the earth to be woven into global flows and supply chains. Though clear when seen from this abstracted viewpoint, it is less apparent how extractive frontiers are constituted, where they begin and end, when encountered up-close. In this presentation, I describe encounters with(in) an extractive frontier in Central Queensland, a region of Australia described by interlocuters as “coal and cattle country”. Drawing from conversations with cattle graziers and Indigenous custodians alongside bodily encounters with cattle and a coal mine, I argue that collating these experiences renders a fuzzy image of an extractive frontier – one that emphasizes multiplicity in experiences and connectivities. I suggest that this fuzziness is important for understanding the uneven impacts of the extractive processes that underpin our collective relations with energy production.
Neda Genova
Holds May Spin
In my contribution I would like to approach the climbing wall as an artificial site allowing us to formulate common themes and problems around climate damage – and not as a model solution that can be scaled up. The climbing wall is an artifice operating as milieu for thought and action, and my proposition is to attend to how it posits problem-solving as an embodied practice that one keeps returning to when climbing. In the paper, I weave together an account of my own experience of climbing with a discussion of climate devastation as a gigantic problem in the world that presents itself as overwhelming, all-pervasive and structurally unfixable. I thus, on the one hand, delve into the peculiar way in which the climbing wall’s surface generates and holds together multiple bodily, technical, affective, and thought registers, while, on the other, discuss climate damage through a series of works that tackle problem-making as a political and epistemological practice (Gelderloos 2022; Goriunova & Fuller 2020; Lury 2021).
Claire Haigh
The Art of Seeing
Our world is on fire. 2024 was the hottest year on record. We face an unprecedented number of heat-related deaths, wildfires and extreme weather events. But our response still falls far short. How can we approach climate policy differently? How can we prevent short-term thinking and political expediency from driving critical decision making?
Greener Vision applies insights from The Tabula Project to the challenge of tackling the climate crisis.
The Tabula Project is a creative endeavour spanning 30 years which aims to provide a new perspective on the mind2 so that we might improve how we think and evolve as a society. The paintings depict different states of consciousness and thought, and the project was informed by extensive research3 across a range of disciplines. We won’t solve our most intractable problems with the same thinking that created them.
Change is possible. But we must start with ourselves.
Inna Häkkinen
‘I Still Call Ignalina the Amber Widow’: the Literary Dimensions of Lithuanian Nuclear Legacy
Serving as a compelling case study for examining the intricate interplay between Soviet nuclear technology and post-colonial national identity (Belli 2021), Lithuanian nuclear legacy includes references to Lithuania’s historical experiences with nuclear smuggling, which underscores its susceptibility as a ‘transperiphery state’ in the Baltic region. (Murauskaitė 2016). The presentation introduces Ursula Wong’s novel Amber Widow (2018) – a part of Wong’s ‘Amber’ series, covering ‘the little-known story of post-World War II Lithuania and the continuing fight against the Soviet occupation’ (Stern 2019) – from the perspective on fictionalizing ‘nuclear terrorism’ agenda of Lithuanian’s decolonial ‘transperiphery’ (Windle 2023). Such perspective appeals to the literary imaginaries of nuclear (anti)terrorism activities within narrating nuclear politics and radiation contamination threat in Lithuania’s nuclear legacy, with the Ignalina Nuclear Power Plant in its focus, as well as the challenges in monitoring and intercepting dual-use materials in a wider context of the Baltic states and Eastern Europe. From intermedial ecocritical perspective (Bruhn 2020) the presentation contributes not only to transmitting nuclear history of the region via emotionalization and personalization of knowledge in fictional narratives, but also to communicating the nuclear agenda at a critical juncture via the literary imaginaries of vulnerability to nuclear terrorism threats.
Katie Hart Potapoff
a gatherer in motion: A Speculative Response to Materiality, Embodiment, and Emotion.
In her Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction Ursula K. Le Guin identified a common issue in contemporary narratives as the imperial nature of the ‘Hero’ figure and his singular perspective. Offered as a counterpoint, Le Guin advocates for a narrative filled with ensembles. This kind of narrative, which she likened to the form of a vessel, offers the ability to hold multiple things in powerful relation to one another and ourselves.
Through a performed paper of intertwined poetry, scholarly prose, and visual art images, this paper responds to the topic of ‘Materiality, embodiment, and emotion’, and more specifically to the question of ‘how one might move and write-with newly formed assemblages using a Gatherer Method’. Offered as an invitation, this paper encourages the audience to reconsider how we as humans might choose to gather together, intertwined and alongside, our more-than-human kin.
Cornelia Helmcke
Island energy visions: from utopia to just transition pathways
Facing the Atlantic, the Scottish Isles have always been characterised by a rough climate, heavy storms and rainfall. But islanders have noticed a change in recent years: unusually long dry periods followed by even more extreme weather events, combined with a noticeable sea-level rise and changing coastlines. Still, the national ambitions for net zero and the energy transition feel far removed from the pressing local issues of fuel poverty and depopulation. Instead, island communities have their own visions of sustainability pathways and future island life. Based on several workshops held on the islands in Summer 2024, this paper will analyse the island energy futures as imagined by local community groups, renewable energy operators and people living with energy insecurity. It will argue how these visions can not only lead the path but inspire just transitions around the country.
Dominic Hinde
Telling the story of the energy transition: Empirical fiction and the busy-ness of everyday life
We are collectively hunting for a story, more specifically a macro story that can shift us from a carbon economy to a decarbonised economy. Old habits and new truths brush against each other in the creation of the future, and there is a tension at the heart of social science research between its desire for empirical objectivism and its embrace of sociology as a narrative sense-making practice. Much has been written on the overlap between journalism, anthropology and ethnography and its potential to address this problematique, with scholars both embracing the confluence of and seeking to police the borders between these respective forms of praxis.
This paper recounts an attempt to bridge this gap, combining affective storytelling with anthropological sensibilities in the production of a public narrative of climate and energy in Scotland. Using anthropological fieldwork, photo montage and journalistic writing, it covers both urban and rural Scotland, constructing the story of energy transition as part of the ‘busyness of everyday life’ on a climate roadtrip through the changing energy landscape.
Jodie Jarvis
Feeling the Chthulucene: Affective witnessing, diffractive media encounters, and the speculative imagination
Haraway’s Chthulucene (2016) invites us to think of the present moment as one of transition, but how do we embody the accompanying call to become otherwise? To enact other worlds and dwell in such “worldly indeterminacy” (Adsit-Morris and Gough 2016)? This paper draws on autoethnographic research undertaken for my PhD on climate affectivity. Through engaging with theory, embodied experience, and affective media entanglements, it diffracts the motif of the apocalypse through the lens of the Chthulucene, seeing its possibility as both a form of affective witnessing (Richardson 2020) and speculative worlding. Critically understood, the apocalyptic imagination—as well as speculative forms of play and narrative—might be seen as tools in which to grapple with the problems of response-ability and change as highlighted by the Chthulucene, much as Heise (2019) explores the ability of science fiction to tackle the problems of temporal and geologic scale imposed by the ‘Anthropocene’.
Mu-Jeong Kho
Karl Polanyi and Post-Keynesians: Can the Basic Income Truly Act as a Trigger to Self-Organise a New Resilient System of Energy?
Hitherto, Post-Keynesians (as Marx-and-Keynes) has been weakly-connected to radical-theory of Polanyi on: whether can a basic-income truly act-as-a-trigger to self-organise a new-resilient-system-of-energy in crisis?, leading to sub-questions: (1) how capitalist-system-of-energy is organised-structurated in real-world (objectivity); (2) what its ‘truly-deeper-originator’ of crisis; (3) how-whether basic-income (truly) act-as-a trigger for self-organisation (in philosophical-value ‘justice’ and history); (4) if untruly, what normative- solutions, addressing political ‘landscapes-of-possibilities’ between reformism-versus-radicalism. This paper, defining ‘self-organisation’ as ‘institutional-process-of-change-with-struggles to reorganise-reconstitute- restructurate an order-out-of-disorder,’ aims to critically-reflect on the questions with institutional-matrix- of-self-organisation structurated by market-versus-non-market; pro-capital-versus-anti-capital, through critical-application of the deeper-understanding of Polanyi into empirical-case-study (with quantitative- data-analysis) on Korea’s energy-system during last-decade. So, this paper argues: beyond superficial-issues ‘market-versus-State,’ ‘Keynesianism-versus-neoliberalism,’ there are deeper-issues ‘structuration’ within capitalist-systems-of-energy in Korea, which most institutional-theories in Post-Keynesian-traditions have well-addressed, arguing that basic-income can act-as-a-trigger. However, these are in turn only-valid when truly-connected to radical-theory, particularly of Polanyi, connecting ‘basic-income’ with long-term vision, beyond such capitalistic-system.
Sebastian Koa
The Heterochronic Rhythms of Nuclear Power Plants and their Wastes
In this paper, I approach the study of energy transition through a case study of Hinkley Point C, the first nuclear power plant to be built in the UK in a generation. Using rhythmanalysis, I explore how issues of spent fuel and their interim storage are in part parsed through the multiple ways that communities living in the shadow of nuclear infrastructures encounter deep futures. Specifically, I argue that these temporal relations of deep futures, or eternal rhythms, are produced through a range of speculative, imaginative, and narrative practices, and operate as a set of heterochronic relations, animated by tensions between notions of permanence and temporariness, knowability and unthinkability. In turn, I trace how these eternal rhythms situate nuclear infrastructures within timescapes where deep time protrudes into the everyday, interweaving the urgency of the contemporary energy transition with the strange and excessive chronopolitics of the longue durée.
Mario Krämer
Caring about landscape aesthetics: the opposition to dam building and wind power in rural Germany
The paper explores the (un)changing perspectives on caring about ‘energy landscapes’ in rural
Germany from a diachronic perspective. It compares two cases of opposition to technological
innovations and energy infrastructure projects interfering with emic perceptions of landscape
aesthetics at different points in time. The first is the opposition to dam building which started in
the late 19th century and transformed into a kind of ‘dam romance’ in the course of the early 20th century. The second case is the emotionally heated, current controversy on wind power extension in rural areas. In both cases, nature conservationists substantiate/d their initial opposition to these technological developments by referring to an infringement of landscape aesthetics. The paper asks what has been and is perceived and felt as ‘the landscape’ and in how far perceptions and emotions have changed – and might further change on the background of the climate crisis – in the course of time.
Sophia Küpers, Susana Batel
Sacrifice for Progress? How Local Communities Re-Negotiate Historical Energy Narratives in Renewable Energy Projects
In this presentation, we explore time and history in people’s meaning-making of renewable energy projects in Portugal. For this, we examined archival television programs about hydropower (1957-2017) and interviewed rural communities hosting wind farms (2023). We suggest that the ways in which local communities relate to wind farms in the present are shaped by collective memories of past energy projects and territorial interventions. We show how notions of ‘sacrifice for progress’ persist across political regimes. Sacrifice narratives were already central to the authoritarian Estado Novo’s hydropower propaganda, which mobilized traditional Christian values to legitimate the rhetorical and infrastructural enactment of energy colonialism in rural Portugal, and to seemingly reconcile its contradictions and devastating local impacts. But rather than merely internalized by local communities confronted with renewable energy projects who mobilize it in coping with change and liminality, our analysis shows how wind farm-hosting communities also use the subversive potential of the logic of sacrifice to challenge the supposed inevitability of ‘doing’ energy as usual.
Anna Kuteleva
Oil in Museums: Petromelancholia and Temporal Narratives of Energy Transition
This paper examines how oil museums and exhibitions mediate complex temporal relationships in the age of energy transition. Drawing on Michel Foucault’s concept of heterotopia and employing Critical Discourse Analysis, I analyze how museums across Azerbaijan, Canada, China, Scotland, and Russia navigate tensions between past, present, and future narratives about oil. I show how museums simultaneously construct nostalgic connections to oil’s “golden age” while projecting speculative futures of continued petroleum dependence. My analysis focuses on how museums’ representation of time ”from deep geological time to imagined futures” influence visitors’ understanding of agency and responsibility in the face of climate change. My findings highlight how these temporal narratives can either enable or inhibit societal capacity to imagine and enact post-oil futures.
Rowan Lear
Unfamiliar Kin: tree grafting, queer energies and vegetal intimacies
Grafting is a biocultural practice developed over thousands of years, through which plants and trees have been propagated through relations with people. It almost all cases, grafting involves the making of an incision or cut in a stem, followed by the insertion or placement of the tissue of a different cultivar, variety or sometimes species of plant, before being bound together for healing. The two plants may accept or reject their new connection, be considered compatible or incompatible, form strong or weak bonds. However, even with a successful and long lasting graft, the two vegetal beings do not fuse or become whole hybrids. Instead, they maintain their different identities, while exchanging fluids and information. Grafting is thus an example of kinship without assimilation, or what Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui describes as ch’ixi, “the parallel coexistence of multiple differences that do not extinguish but instead antagonize and complement each other”. This paper proposes to consider the phenomena of grafting through the lens of queer and decolonial thinking on kinship, tendency and intimacy. Further, it will argue that grafting is a marginalised energy practice of diversion, inclination and affinity, which can offer a more-than-human horizon for flourishing into the future.
Charlotte Lee
Using creativity to build communities of care and climate hope in the classroom
Current student cohorts are more likely to have encountered climate activism and yet may not perceive activism or its potential for change positively. Furthermore, climate anxiety is increasingly prevalent and such anxiety can extend beyond the climate itself to perceptions of climate (in)action (Marczak et al, 2023). This paper will reflect on geography undergraduate teaching which seeks to expand conceptions of activism, encourage increased participation and build climate hope (Solnit and Young Lutunatabua, 2023). Creative workshops were designed with these aims in mind and included zines, collage, poetry, and countermapping, with additional sessions coordinated by climate activists of North Sea Knitters. The workshops unexpectedly built community amongst students, and students and activists, and created space to engage with difficult climate emotions. Creative practices should arguably play an increasingly role in all our teaching, helping to foster learning communities able to “re-imagine, re-create, re-construct in radically different ways” (Schwittay, 2023: 13).
Joohee Lee, Hana Kim
Perceived Energy Justice: Toward Conceptualization and Indicator Development
Energy justice has gained increasing recognition in global sustainability transition discourses and is beginning to take center stage in national climate and energy policies, although it often remains abstract. A critical step in advancing and operationalizing energy justice is understanding how people perceive the issue in their everyday lives. However, research on perceived energy justice has been limited. To address this gap, we propose a conceptual framework for examining citizens’ perceptions of energy (in)justice as a sustainability issue and the factors influencing their perceptions. Drawing on the literature, we introduce two key dimensions—risk and empoweredness—at both collective and individual levels, forming the backbone of our framework for perceived energy justice. These dimensions are further detailed through the development of indicators that capture the public’s perspectives, lived experiences, and concerns related to energy justice issues. This work lays the groundwork for future survey-based research on perceived energy justice.
Yi Li
Liquid Belonging: Rootless Commitment, Care, and Contentment in Migrants’ Eco-creative Practices in Aotearoa New Zealand
Voluntary migrants’ experiences of environmental vulnerability have been largely overlooked by academics. This ethnographic, interdisciplinary study, conducted in Aotearoa New Zealand from 2021 to 2024, examines how voluntary migrants engaged with their ecological surroundings through artistic and everyday practices amidst post-pandemic and climate uncertainties. Identified as ‘eco-creative practitioners’ or ‘migrant eco-creators’, 38 migrants were interviewed to explore how their sensuous engagements with the ocean and the bush aligned personal happiness and belonging with collective well-being and regenerative living, via eco-creative practices. I argue that their intimate connection with the land fosters a fluid sense of belonging and serves as a foundation for geographic happiness. Their care for and sharing of Aotearoa’s landscapes express their commitment to the place, bringing positive emotions in the times of crisis. Despite their rootlessness, their intentional use of embodied practices to connect with the land nurtures resilience, creativity, and hope.
Vincent Moystad
Indigeneity, Extraction, Intensities: Arctic-Caribbean Polyphonies
In the 1970s, the democratic social governments of Michale Manley in Jamaica and Oddvar Nordli formed key nuclei in the development of an international aluminium cartel, modelled on OPEC. Jamaica was (and remains) a key site of bauxite extraction, while Norway’s plentiful hydroelectricity made the refining of bauxite into aluminium an important vector of national development. Both governments envisioned international cooperation among producers as key to a more equitable and democratic world order.
By the end of the 1970s this vision of development was in rapid retreat in the face of neo-liberal retrenchment. In turn, resistance to the extraction of bauxite and large-scale hydroelectric development on unceded Maroon land in Jamaica and in Sápmi respectively became the focal point for the development of Maroon and Sámi indigenous identities.
This paper seeks to theorise this indigenisation of social struggle across the aluminium supply chain and its complex relationship to socialist developmentalism, building on the work of Sylvia Wynter, Neil Roberts, Chief Richard Currie, Maxida Märak, and the Mazé Group. More speculatively, the paper will consider global supply chains, extractive industries, and energy-intensive mineral refinement as vectors for the development of indigenous practices of resistance.
Anh-Quân Nguyen
What is Greenwashing?
The term “Greenwashing” has become a central battleground in climate and environmental debates, with activists, journalists and NGOs accusing businesses and governments of falsely or deceptively advertising their products, policies and actions as environmentally or climate friendly. My claim is that greenwashing is a speech act with propagandistic purpose for governments and corporations that seek to limit, silence or undermine climate and environmental policies, constituting “undermining propaganda” as it appeals to a political ideal that it ends up undermining. I provide three observations in support: Firstly, greenwashing is a way to silence climate activists, journalists and scientists by making their assertions misfire. Secondly, greenwashing mirrors covert intentional dogwhistles by exploiting existing social resentments as a tool for political manipulation. Thirdly, greenwashing constitutes conceptual domination, a form of conceptual engineering that exploits institutional authority to enforce the uptake of a revised concept.
Chau Cong Anh Nguyen
Acts of Care and Emotional Resilience in Vietnam’s Youth Climate and Environmental Organisations
The realities of climate change place a significant burden on young people, who will bear its long-term consequences. Many are actively engaged in climate action through individual and collective efforts (Hermans & Korhonen, 2017; Pickering et al., 2021), with youth-led organisations serving as a key space for participation. In Vietnam, a country highly vulnerable to climate change, the Youth Climate Action Network (YNET) connects sustainability and climate groups nationwide. Drawing on 1.5 years of ethnographic research and focus groups with YNET, I explore young people’s experiences in these organisations, with the emotional dimension of their engagement being a critical aspect. Key themes of my paper include feelings of empowerment and connection between participants and collective acts of care. By highlighting these lived experiences, I aim to deepen understanding of youth perspectives and the ways in which emotional resilience and community support shape youth actions in climate-vulnerable regions.
Siôn Parkinson, Milo Philips
How Do We Visualise a Herbarium as a Hyperobject? Answer: Herbarium: The Animated Musical
In August 2024, the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh (RBGE) digitised its one-millionth specimen: Stereocaulon vesuvianum, a volcano lichen from Ben Nevis. Part of a wider effort to make its three-million-strong collection visible to the public, this milestone raises a question: how do we grasp such scale, duration, and the enormous energy involved in collecting, classifying, and maintaining plant and fungal collections? This 20-minute performance-lecture reimagines the digital herbarium, not as datatset, but as a durational cinematic experience—an animated musical video that, at 24 frames per second, turns millions of images into an endurance test of perception.
Inspired by materialist filmmakers like Stan Brakhage (Mothlight, 1963), this presentation invites audiences to sit with the weight of botanical history. Offering a short teaser (not the full 34-hours required to animate the entire collection), it proposes an alternative, affective way to experience the sheer magnitude of biodiversity and its loss.
Katie Pfeiffer
The mark of the (more-than-human) maker: regenerative materials and the value of nature’s labour
This paper examines how regenerative material designers challenge traditional notions of material value. Taking regenerative biomaterials and leathers as case studies, I argue that the ‘value’ ascribed to these materials goes beyond human utility or labour; it arises from the origin of materials—the human and more-than-human labour that enables their existence—and their distributed impacts on more-than-human worlds. For regenerative leather producers, a seemingly undesirable scratch in leather is both proof of a cow’s outdoor life and a sign of the hide’s plastic-free coating, indexing its environmental value. This paper explores how the inclusion of non-human labour and the benefits generated for more-than-humans challenge traditional anthropological discussions of value. I propose that regenerative material designers’ approach to value marks not only a shift in material aesthetics but also questions conventional understandings of value generation, connecting aesthetic signs of value to ecological and ethical considerations as much as human experience.
Andrea E. Pia
Proofers of Crisis: horror, glee, and emotional editing in climate (in)action
Scientists Rebellion’s question, “What’s the point of documenting catastrophe if we’re unwilling to act?” prompts this paper’s investigation into barriers hindering climate action. By comparing ethnographic research within Italian youth climate movements with anthropological studies on public complacency, the paper explores how inaction involves emotional and imaginative “editing” that normalises collective inadequacy. It reveals affective intensities, like the enjoyment derived from horror or glee, underpinning neglect, denial, and disavowal. These are captured through the metaphors of proofing, editing, and crossing–out: performative gestures enabling climate-concerned individuals to manage the implications of ecological collapse within self-defensive world-making projects. The paper argues that anthropologists should move beyond simply recognising this defensive posture and instead contribute to conceptual frameworks that radicalise popular climate mobilisation.
Eric Poettschacher
ENERGY IN PLACE: Ways to navigate culture-led energy transitions
Energy in Place is a long-term action research project advancing Social Design methods for placemaking in the context of energy transitions. It provides practical tools for energy communities to gain a nuanced understanding how topography, perception habits and collective experiences shape place-based energy practices on multiple scales. Conceived as a modular system Energy in Place applies different lenses of energy sensemaking. This approach allows energy communities to build on the specific affordances of a given cultural landscape and encourages small-scale experiments instead of normative, one-size-fits-all strategies.
Energy in Place integrates elements of Cultural placemaking, Situational awareness, Participatory ethnography, Social ecology, Worldbuilding, and Cosmo-Localization. Research findings will be made available continuously and contribute to an ever evolving method kit.
Ava Rawson
Decision Horizons: Decommissioning and the Reproduction of Capitalism in the North Sea Oil and Gas Industry
Nearly halfway through the proclaimed “Decade of Decommissioning” (OEUK, 2021), this analysis explores how capitalism, as a project, is reproduced through the decommissioning of offshore oil and gas installations within the North Sea. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with North Sea oil and gas industry stakeholders, offshore rig’s economization, their im/mobility, and future-making technologies are explored as the social mechanisms producing contentious realities of liability, eternity, and the “net-zero era”. This analysis foundationally highlights the mechanisms which render capitalism real through decommissioning, and how they in turn, are evident within major oil and gas operators contributions in, rather than to, the net zero era. The conscious employment of these mechanisms in the reproduction and maintenance of capitalism is not only evident within decommissioning, but serves as a vehicle facilitating, and constructing, the energy transition in the North Sea. I argue that while such consequences have been attributed to capitalism deified, understanding these phenomena as social labour in the production of the coherence and durability of capitalism provides the conceptual space for hope.
Eva Richter, Nicol Staňková
Passing the Motion: Shared Energy Futures in Apartment Buildings
Apartment buildings illustrate the broader challenges and opportunities of collective energy futures. Adopting renewable energy sources in multi-owned buildings requires passing a motion through collective decision-making and cooperation among diverse owners connected through formal and informal relationships determined by past conflicts or cooperation. This study examines decision-making processes around solar power adoption and energy sharing in 10 apartment communities in Czechia. Using observational data, interviews, and surveys, we explore factors important for reaching a common decision. We analyse how ethical, community, spatial, and individual factors, such as shared or conflicting priorities, common beliefs, procedural fairness, information sharing, rationality, and constructiveness shape deliberative processes and outcomes. By offering insights into the complexities of these collective processes, this research provides guidance for flat owners and owner organizations, policymakers, and practitioners aiming to empower communities during energy transitions. Ultimately, it contributes to broader conversations about building collaborative, equitable, and resilient energy futures in resilient communities.
Alejandra Rodríguez-Remedi
Understanding crude entanglements through arts-based research: Reflecting Oil (2019-2024)
Reflecting Oil: Arts-based Research on Oil Transitionings, a project led by artist Ernst Logar at the University of Applied Arts Vienna in collaboration with scientists at the University of Leoben, approaches the materiality of crude oil creatively to explore those properties which are hard to quantify and relate them to the substance’s cultural embeddedness. The project’s premise: to imagine a future beyond oil, we must first understand our profound entanglements with it. Through the artworks emanating from the project, encapsulating concepts discussed by the interdisciplinary research team, the public has been invited to engage in a multisensorial experience which seeks to facilitate a shift in perception about oil. My presentation would offer an account of this research process, thereby contributing to reflection about how artistic methodologies can feed into scholarly thinking and how academics can support artists in imagining sustainable futures.
Alison Scott
This paper draws on my PhD research, which asks: what new understandings of forest environments (their inhabitants, their management, and their histories) can be elicited through artistic production? As a practice based artist researcher, I use experimental eco-critical written and visual forms to explore ‘weathering’ (Neimanis & Walker 2014) and ‘commoning’ (Baldauf, Hille & Krauss 2018) in relation to art and forestry, where these methods to attend to the sensorial and ways that climate change is embodied. This paper will offer a critical, feminist perspective on methods of observing and recording forest environments, particularly those that emerge through film and artists moving-image practices, and suggests how film and digital media might be used in a feminist reconstruction of forest ‘commons’. In this work, how can we make historic, current, human and more-than-human struggles, differences and negotiations legible? How can art, particularly artist’s film, allow new forms of sociality and relationality to emerge?
Yuwei Wang
Intergenerational Dynamics in Creative Placemaking: The Role of Community Musical Participation in Shaping Cross-Generational Interaction
With the ongoing development and revitalisation of urban spaces, creative placemaking has taken diverse forms, including the establishment of arts districts and creative communities. This study examines Aranya, a newly developed community in northern China that integrates environmental arts initiatives and architectural design to construct a unique model of creative placemaking. The research explores residents’ motivations for engaging in musical activities and their broader impact on community life. Through thematic analysis, the study has identified a strong relationship between affective atmospheres and intergenerational interactions within the community. These findings contribute to discussions on how musical participation within creative communities fosters social cohesion and intergenerational engagement. By situating Aranya as a case study, this research offers insights into the role of music as a medium for cultural expression, social interaction, and identity negotiation in sustainability of contemporary creative communities.
Natalie Wardell
Pretending the World Is Funny and Forever: Reflections on the Aesthetics of Hauntological Liminality
This presentation explores the intersections of hauntology and liminality as frameworks for understanding emotional and aesthetic responses to the meta-crisis, including the climate crisis and the effects of late-stage capitalism. Drawing on my Master’s research, which linked Mark Fisher’s concept of hauntology to liminal spaces, I examine how the growing ubiquity of “liminal aesthetics” reflects collective anxieties and hopes for the future.
Using a research-driven methodology that prioritizes emotional resonance and material interactions, I analyze contemporary visual art, installations, and digital media to explore how these works encapsulate unresolved tensions. My work examines how the aesthetics of technology and nostalgia convey the spectral presence of futures that might never come to pass, particularly within a world shaped by existential risks.
The climate crisis, resource depletion, and technological acceleration contribute to a growing sense of planetary precarity. Beyond threatening human civilization, ecological distress raises the possibility of irreversible planetary collapse. Within this framework, my research investigates how visual culture reflects and responds to these anxieties, engaging with the aesthetics of uncertainty, loss, and speculative futures.
Key examples include my use of digitized VHS footage as a “ghost image” and installations such as a rain window that embodies thresholds between nostalgia and uncertainty. These aesthetics, I argue, invite audiences to engage emotionally and materially with the challenges of imagining future possibilities through the potential existential risks posed by ecological crises and the possibility of planetary undoing.
Through this presentation, I aim to demonstrate how creative practices contribute to broader conversations about temporality, care, and the collective mental health impacts of our ability to envision new futures in response to these crises.
Susan Wardell and Fan Eric Feng
?topia: an experiment in collaborative world-building
Dystopia, utopia, or something else? In nature, many creatures shape their worlds using the materials on hand. Humans, too, build and rebuild our societies constantly. The climate crisis asks us, more than ever, to think about the world we want. The ?topia project seeks to facilitate experimental, participatory, playful, and localised arts-based events, through which people are invited to respond to the question of ‘‘what might a more caring world look and feel like?”. In May 2025, the first two pilot projects were undertaken. In Dunedin, New Zealand, a one-day event titled ‘D/well’ invited tertiary students and staff to reflect creatively on the role of housing in infrastructures of care (between both people, economies, and the planet), recognising quality of student housing as an important local issue. Through shared material play with recycled cardboard, a large sculpture/dwelling was created. In Hong Kong, an event called ‘Bottles in a Bag’ ran weekly for three weeks, intending to engage students in environmental concerns through self-care actions. It directly addressed the issue of insufficient rest spaces for university students by transforming discarded plastic bottles into comfortable beanbag chairs. These beanbags provided students with much-needed relaxation areas while promoting sustainability and eco-consciousness. In this paper, we share short films representing each of the experiments and speak to some of the goals, challenges, and outcomes.
Joost Wijffels
Desperate Times Call For … Hope? Navigating Actionism, Resistance, and Affirmation in the Anthropocene
The urgent and existential nature of the ecological crisis easily inspires fear and desperation, begging for radical interventions. According to Theodor Adorno, such interventions easily relapse into actionism, which reproduces the instrumental and self-centred thinking that undergirds our contemporary crises. This paper engages with these hesitations about actionism to reflect on the role of desperation and hope in facing the climate crisis. Accordingly, I explain how Adorno’s hesitations about actionism led him to endorse a negativistic and critical form of resistance. According to Eve Sedgwick, however, such negativism further entrenches a paralysing paranoid position. Following Eve Sedgwick and John Holloway, I argue that combatting the desperate climate crisis strangely requires we remain hopeful. When rooted in a refusal of the present, hope conveys and inspires the desire for an ‘otherwise’ and can help us understand what this ‘otherwise’ might look like and how we might obtain it.
Nora Wuttke
Artful Ethnography in Energy Research
Artmaking offers to be an additional sense to engage with the world. Therefore, I proposed an art residency to be based at the Durham Energy institute for the EDI+ fellowship that aims to redress inequalities in the energy sector. Over two years, I artistically investigate how energy research perpetuates or challenges existing inequalities, has the potential to create new solidarities between humans and non-humans, and what this means when striving for a more equitable world. At the halfway point of the project, I reflect on what my artful ethnographic practice offers (multidisciplinary) energy research. In this, I am drawing on my experience as social anthropologist, architectural engineer and artist working in a team of engineers on projects such as ELEXIA, a large EU funded research consortium, as well as art residencies at SOAS and UCL in London, and my artful ethnographic PhD research. Tying in with the themes of speculation, imagination, and possible futures, this paper will share early insights from the art residency project, discussing its methodology of artfully (re)imaging a future with engineers and other energy researchers, as well as its challenges and draw backs.
Films
Gair Dunlop
As above, so below
Situationist experimental practice would often use a map of one place as a guide to another, in a process of defamiliarization and re-thinking the relations between what we experience and our preconceptions. Taking this idea further, the Bervie Brow Research Station (a Cold war bunker poised above the North Sea) is an ideal place to reflect on New Nature, the green-ness of the offshore windfarm constellations along the coast, and the strange balance between idyll and apocalypse represented by such sites. The aim is twofold- firstly to re-imagine these sites of crisis as something new. Secondly, to take lessons from those times to see what might be applicable in the current ecological moment. Drawing on Latour, contemporary archaeological debate, and requestioning of the idea of the bunker as the ‘obscene exception,’ the site is imagined as a zone for creative remaking of our relations to the present.
Adrian Fisk
JUSTNORTH
With fraught geopolitical tension and the impact of climate change life in the Arctic is more uncertain than ever. As the European Union looks to the polar north to enable its clean energy transition what do the people of this remote region think? What happens when academia collaborates with a creative film maker in order to influence global policy in the Arctic. The JUSTNORTH documentary is a good example of the power of such collaboration. Filmed over two years, the JUSTNORTH documentary meets Sami reindeer herders, Icelandic fishermen, Inuit islanders and the residents of Europe’s largest iron ore town. Embarking on a journey across the Arctic this film seeks to understand what the people of this extraordinary polar region really want in their lives.
Kat Hutton
“Every Apple is Picked One-By-One and That Hasn’t Changed for 10,000 Years”: Narratives of Resistance in Canadian Agriculture
At the intersection of innovation and immigration, farms once considered small and sustainable in the Okanagan Valley, British Columbia, now face critical tensions and an uncertain future. While industry giants like Wal-Mart invest in regenerative agriculture at scale with soil optimization and robotics, a techno-optimistic future looms over human cultures of food-production. Meanwhile, by some estimates two-thirds of all agricultural labourers in Canada are hired illegally and face misattributed blame for systemic failures. Drawing on ethnographic interviews with farmers, labourers, and “crew-boss” middlemen, with reference to my documentary for CBC, I intend to demonstrate how agricultural workers reject the scapegoating narratives that would pit them against each other and instead fight against the odds to cultivate local ecosystems. This paper seeks to forward anthropological thought on well-being, cyborg, and human ecologies in agriculture, and implores listeners to consider whether we are not morally obligated to see food-production as an ecosystem.
Callum Kellie
Fae the Rigs – Revisited
Fae the Rigs – Revisited is a short documentary that combines original photography, archive footage, and audio interviews to explore the social impact that North Sea oil work exerts on its workforce and their families.
Building on the poetic approaches to found footage utilised in “Mirrored Transitions”, which was presented at Energy Ethics 2023 – Financing the Future at the Byre Theatre. The film expands on these techniques with original stills photography and interviews to create a poetic yet confessional short film.
Featuring testimonies from union leaders, fathers and female voices, the documentary weaves together recurring stories to explore the shared experiences and themes of isolation, guilt, and identity offering a deeply personal reflection on life within the industry.
David Kendall
Other Lines
Climate change can be a seen or unseen ecological phenomenon and in this single frame thermal film, Other Lines I made visible through the expressive lens of mobile cellular smart technology. This experimental art production visualises hazardous air pollutants and particulates emanating from industrial sites in Merseyside, United Kingdom. Digital technology and landscape imagery merge seamlessly to thoughtfully examine active sites of atmospheric perpetual renewal and energy consumption, instantly determined by the material world of the built environment. Furthermore, the unique project aims to investigate how blurring and ghosting produced by thermographic imaging. Efficiently generate, sensorial, ethereal and emotive art objects and screen surfaces that embody fluctuating environmental topographies. As an aesthetic result, this complex assemblage of unfolding thermal narratives outline multiple horizons: Transparent and opaque layers of air pollution emerge as evocative digital image formations revealing visible and invisible elements of atmospheric change along the Wirral peninsula.
Christine Seely
Dissonance
Dissonance is a single channel video piece created using footage collected on the Greenland ice sheet working alongside climate scientists in the summer of 2019, the hottest on record. In the midst of the climate crisis the piece focuses on the dissonance of the bodily experience of this otherworldly and rapidly changing environment. The footage centres around the artist’s interactions with sparkling melt water as she labours to hold onto small glistening pieces of ice while they melt against the heat of her fingers and hand. The interjection of the artist’s body serves as a conduit for the viewer’s experience and the subtle audio of the surrounding wind and water mixing with the sounds of long exhales of breath onto the lens and the crunch of foot steps on the icy surface build into a meditative, enchanting but simultaneously loaded narrative.
Installations
Peter Iain Campbell
We Drift Like Worried Fire
Deindustrialisation is a long-held fascination of mine. Photography gave me a means to explore the living remnants of the increasingly post-industrial landscape around us. In 2013, I became especially intrigued by our last remaining heavy industry – oil and gas – how it could possess an ability to be instrumental in shaping our society and influencing governments, and yet for the majority of people, its source remained firmly rooted in our imaginations, existing far beyond our physical horizons, hundreds of miles out at sea.
Deindustrialisation is a long-held fascination of mine. Photography gave me a means to explore the living remnants of the increasingly post-industrial landscape around us. In 2013, I became especially intrigued by our last remaining heavy industry – oil and gas – how it could possess an ability to be instrumental in shaping our society and influencing governments, and yet for the majority of people, its source remained firmly rooted in our imaginations, existing far beyond our physical horizons, hundreds of miles out at sea.
Neil Gordon Davey
Reflect, Create, Communicate: Visual Narratives of Orkney’s Energy Transition
Combining insights from various disciplines is crucial to addressing climate change and energy transitions. Moreover, emerging energy infrastructure shapes human behaviours and routines. Sensory experiences and visual communication can make abstract concepts more relatable. For example, visual narratives help convey the complexities of human/technology/environment relationships, while creative, participatory methods help envision future scenarios.
The exhibit features photographs taken between 2022-2024 from the Orkney Islands as part of Neil Davey’s PhD project ‘Altered landscapes of a post-carbon future’. The images reflect, interpret, and communicate responses to Orkney’s energy transition, enhancing and adding depth and context to the research. Each image is accompanied by a QR code which links to a small multimedia presentation to challenge conventional thinking about energy infrastructure and landscape change, offering diverse perspectives and contributing to a rich, multi-dimensional understanding of the visual, emotional, and sensory impacts on the Orcadian landscape and community.
Adrian Fisk
Until the last Oak falls
Until the last Oak falls is a collection of extraordinary photographs by Adrian Fisk from early British environmental direct action protests 1995 – 1999. These photographs remind us of those that did all they could quarter of a century ago to warn us of the dangers of environmental destruction. For the newer generation of environmental activists these photographs shine a light on the roots of the movement they rightly fight so hard for. Having a clear sense and understanding of the lineage and ancestry they follow strengthens those who currently work tirelessly to change our present trajectory. What was activism like back then and why is it important now?
Susie Johnston
Reclamation/ to cry again.
This ceramic sculpture ‘Reclamation / to cry again’ comprises an artwork made from reclaimed raw clay from a decommissioned oil field site in the Bohai Sea, China, and crude oil extracted from the North Sea between Scotland and Norway. The sculpture is to be installed on a table with one chair in front of it, inviting the viewer to sit and notice, to pause, to correspond.
Adam Sebire
anthropoScene XII: Work In Progress
In this 2024 performance artwork, a lone figure tends to three sublime glacial icebergs frozen into sea ice. Known to Greenlandic Inuit as kassoq these are exquisitely coloured formations of translucent glacier ice, created under enormous pressure at the base of the Greenland ice sheet (Sermersuaq) before being transported by the flow of the Qarajaq (Store) glacier. They’re likely to be millennia-old.
As the screens loop, bergy bits are repetitively mopped, swept and polished of fallen snow. Their carer’s Sisyphean endeavours are punctuated by moments of connection between him and the ice.