Amid growing calls for a worldwide energy transition, Emily Eaton, Andrew Stevens, and Sean Tucker highlight the possibility of an unjust transition, particularly for workers. Their research on the struggle of oil refinery workers in Regina, Saskatchewan, demonstrates that a just transition will only happen if people fight for it.
Read articleHelios is a new interview series about cutting edge EH research and the creative processes that bring it to life. Our second installment features Anne Pasek, a Canada Research Chair in Media, Culture, and the Environment whose research aims to reshape our understanding of carbon, the Internet, and how humanities scholars think about and do research in a warming world.
Read articleEvery day, up to 540,000 barrels of natural gas liquids and crude oil flow under the Great Lakes in the Enbridge Line 5 pipline connecting Western Canada to Eastern Canada. Jeffrey Insko--energy humanities scholar and Michigan resident--explains why a grassroots coalition of indigenous groups, politicians, environmentalists, and other concerned citizens wants the pipeline shut down, as well as what makes this pipline battle different.
Read articleThere is a growing body of Canadian ecopoetry that takes as its subject the links between oil, land, and colonialism. Poetry scholar Max Karpinski has studied these poets and explains how one of them--Lesley Battler--subtly reuses the bland terminology of the petrochemical industry to create poetic insights into our fossil-fueled condition.
Read articleBrent Ryan Bellamy explores what it means to do fieldwork in the energy humanities classroom and reflects on how an "oil inventory" assignment can reorient how students see literature, themselves, and the world.
Read articleMaja and Reuben Fowkes, art historians, curators, and co-directors of the Postsocialist Art Centre at University College London, discuss their new book, Ilona Németh: Eastern Sugar. Through essays, interviews, and artistic interventions, the book examines the decline of sugar beet production in Eastern Europe as synecdoche of post-Soviet transition while reckoning with the entangled histories of sugar, colonialism, and extractivism in the Caribbean and Eastern Europe and suggesting alternate futures.
Read articleRural communities are often hit hard by climate change but face significant barriers in mitigating its effects. Enock Mac'Ouma describes a project of the UNESCO Chair on Community Radio for Agricultural Education at Rongo University, Kenya, which uses community radio to accelerate rural education and technology transfer in a particularly vulnerable region.
Read articleHelios is a new interview series about cutting edge EH research and the creative processes that bring it to life. Our first installment features Simon Orpana, an artist and researcher from Hamilton, ON who turns sophisticated concepts and complex histories into arresting graphic narratives.
Read articleResearcher Sydney Hart explains his web-based project to scrutinize the flight networks that support the operations of some of the world's largest gold mining companies. Rather than "flight shaming" individuals, "Mining Maps" shines a light on corporate responsibility for climate change.
Read articleIn 2008, Canadian artist Sandra Sawatzky set out to embroider the social history of oil. Nine years and 17, 000 hours of work later, she completed her epic Black Gold Tapestry, which visualizes our relationship to energy like never before.
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