After Oil 3: Volatile Trajectories Podcast Series

12 Min Read

November 25, 2022

AOS 3 is a joint project of the Petrocultures Research Group and Transitions in Energy, Culture, and Society, with funding from Future Energy Systems and the Canada First Research Fund.

Driven by the urgent need to reject the reigning energy regime of fossil fuels, a collective of researchers and writers who collaborate under the name After Oil recently got together to begin a new project, After Oil 3 (AOS 3). One of the goals of the first AOS 3 meeting in October 2022 was to imagine specific pathways out of our current impasse, to explore ways of walking those pathways, and to think deeply about climate action. An outcome of that meeting--a six-episode podcast series called Volatile Trajectories--has just been released online and will be featured in the Environmental Humanities Month 2022 Program.

Written and recorded over a day and a half at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity in October 2022, Volatile Trajectories features leading and emerging energy humanities researchers in conversation about how we find our way beyond fossil fuels and climate crisis.

The podcast episodes are available embedded below, on the EH Video page, and on YouTube.

AOS 3 is planning to meet several times in 2023-2024, adding new collaborators and creating more exciting work. Keep an eye out for a new book and other experiments in the coming months.

Led by esteemed organizers Mark Simpson, Scott Stoneman, Imre Szeman, and Caleb Wellum, AOS 3 brings together a diverse array of contributors including Stacey Balkan, Darin Barney, Cara Daggett, Tommy Davis, Emily Eaton, Walter Gordon, Eva-Lynn Jagoe, Robert Johnson, Graeme MacDonald, Swaralipi Nandi, Penelope Plaza, Terra Schwerin Rowe, Hiroki Shin, Allan Stoekl, Scott Stoneman, Jennifer Wenzel, Sarah Marie Wiebe, Rhys Williams, and Anna Zalik.

Thank you! Your submission has been received!
Oops! Something went wrong while submitting the form.

Read More

November 30, 2023

Frédéric Caille

Many people first encounter energy history in museums, where they learn about heroic steam powered engines and fossil-fueled technologies. The history of solar energy technologies, argues Frédéric Caille, is often either forgotten or repressed in these spaces. Such forgetting distorts our understanding of the past and narrows our sense of future possibilities. With his collaborative project to recover, reconstruct, and display forgotten solar water pumps from the 1970s, Caille and his colleagues frame forgotten solar technologies as “cosmograms”: objects which describe the world as it could have been, and could yet become.

Read
January 20, 2022

David McDermott Hughes

In this author's note on his new book, Who Owns the Wind?, anthropologist David Hughes offers a tantalizing glimpse of what energy justice could look like, and why it matters.

Read
all articles