Energy Futures: Anthropocene Challenges, Emerging Technologies and Everyday Life

Published by De Gruyter 2023

Energy Futures

Anthropocene Challenges, Emerging Technologies and Everyday Life

Edited by: Simone Abram , Karen Waltorp , Nathalie Ortar and Sarah Pink

Volume 10 in the series De Gruyter Contemporary Social Sciences

https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110745641

Overview
Contents

About this book

Everyday life as we knew it is increasingly challenged in a world of climate, social, health and political crisis. Emerging technologies, data analytics and automation open up new possibilities which have implications for energy generation, storage and energy demand. To support these changes we urgently need to rethink how energy will be sourced, shared and used. Yet existing approaches to this problem, driven by engineering, data analytics and capital, are dangerously conservative and entrenched.

Energy Futures critically evaluates this context, and the energy infrastructures, stakeholders, and politics that participate in it, to propose plausible, responsible and ethical modes of encountering possible energy futures. Imagining anthropocene challenges, emerging technologies and everyday life otherwise through empirically grounded studies, opens up possible energy futures.

Energy Futures proposes and demonstrates a new critical and interventional futures-oriented energy anthropology. Combining the theories and methods of futures anthropology with the critical expertise and perspectives of energy anthropology creates a powerful mode of engagement, which this book argues is needed to disrupt the dominant narratives about our energy futures. Its contributors collectively reveal and evidence through innovative ethnographic practice how new knowledge about imagined and possible energy futures can be mobilised in engagements with emerging technologies, anthropocene challenges and everyday realities.

In doing so it brings together authors, analytical expertise and ethnographic evidence from the global south, north and places in between, generated through innovative methodologies including remote video and comic strip methods and documentary video practice as well as long term fieldwork.

Presents a new conceptual framework for a futures-focused energy anthropology
Shows how energy futures are imagined across different stakeholders
Reveals the different scales, spatialities & temporalities of different imaginaries of energy futures

Author / Editor information

Simone Abram, Durham, UK; Karen Waltorp, Copenhagen, Denmark; Nathalie Ortar, ENTPE, France; Sarah Pink, Monash, Australia.

Reviews

"Energy Futures shows us that not only do we need to be thinking deeply about our shared energy horizons but that we need to act, collectively, against the complicities of colonialism, technophilic solutions and capitalist logics so entrenched in regimes of energy. The authors, all leading thinkers in the field, offer exceptional insights on how energies and futures are entangled with experience as well as expectation, and they skillfully argue that anthropology needs to be a critical voice in these larger geopolitical debates."

Cymene Howe, Rice University, Houston, Texas

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	I
Acknowledgments Publicly Available Download PDF	V
Table of Contents Publicly Available Download PDF	VII
1 Imagining energy futures: an introduction Sarah Pink, Nathalie Ortar, Karen Waltorp and Simone Abram Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
2 Everyday futures, spaces, and mobilities Sarah Pink, Katherine Ellsworth-Krebs, Michiel Köhne, Elisabet Dueholm Rasch, Nathalie Ortar, Aurore Flipo and Kari Dahlgren Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	25
3 Contested futures of/with energy generation Simone Abram, Chiara Bresciani, Hsin-yi Lu, Katja Müller and Asta Vonderau Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	71
4 Powering ‘smart’ futures: data centres and the energy politics of digitalisation Nathalie Ortar, A. R. E. Taylor, Julia Velkova, Patrick Brodie, Alix Johnson, Clément Marquet, Andrea Pollio and Liza Cirolia Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	125
5 Imagining energy futures beyond colonial continuation Karen Waltorp, Ragnhild Freng Dale, Martín Fonck and Pierre du Plessis Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	169
Author biographies Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	215
Index Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	221

(Deutsch)

Language: English
Publisher: De Gruyter
Audience: Scholars and students of Energy Studies, Anthropology, Geography, Psychology, History, Sociology, STS.
Pages
- Front matter: 7
- Main content: 227
Illustrations
- Illustrations: 40
- Tables: 1
Keywords: Energy Futures; Futures Anthropology; Data ethics; Sociotechnical Imaginaries; Crisis

eBook

Published: December 31, 2022
ISBN: 9783110745641

Hardcover

Published: December 31, 2022
ISBN: 9783110745627