In the second of a two-part series on Racial Capital by emerging researchers, Shouhei Tanaka (Postdoctoral Scholar, University of Southern California) explores how Chickasaw writer Linda Hogan’s novel Solar Storms (1995) fictionalizes the James Bay Cree hydroelectric conflict and places it in the longer histories of North American settler colonialism. For Tanaka, energy modernity is a history of empire and the future of energy must necessarily be a future of decolonization.

In the first of a two-part series on Racial Capital by emerging researchers, Marah Nagelhout (PhD candidate, Brown University) traces the convergence of ecological remediation and the carceral logic of reform in the "toxic prisons" built on or near environmental sacrifice zones around the United States. For Nagelhout, "these volatile containment infrastructures are expressions of a primary contradiction of capitalism that arises from the structural necessitation of waste in the value form of capital itself."