12 Min Read
June 6, 2025
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Hélène Ducros holds a PhD in geography and a JD from UNC–Chapel Hill. Her work on rural development and sense of place appears in journals such as Global Environmental Politics. She co-edited Justice in Climate Action Planning (2022).
Nicholas Ostrum is assistant professor of history at Kent State University and holds a PhD from Stony Brook. He researches West German relations with petrostates and has published in International History Review and edited volumes on global Germany.
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In 2017, Imre Szeman and Dominic Boyer published the celebrated edited volume, Energy Humanities, which defined this new interdisciplinary field for the first time.1 Since then, much of relevance and consequence has happened that Szeman and Boyer could not have predicted: COVID-19, the Russian invasion of Ukraine and its implications for European energy systems, the changing discursive contours and stalling of the green transition, increasingly erratic global climatic patterns—causing natural and human disasters all over the world such as the recent prolonged dry spells in southern Africa, wildfires in Canada and California, or flooding in Europe—and the continued rise of climate-denialist and hyper-extractivist populism. These developments and their geopolitical and cultural ramifications only add urgency to the energy humanities project.
As the contributors in the series here agree, humanity is indeed at a crossroads. As part of the multifaceted approach necessary to face the present conjuncture, it is useful to consider both how energy has led us to it and how it may help us find a way out of it. Whether on the producing or consuming side, today’s societies across the globe all depend on energy, which, following Timothy Morton, is so complex, encompassing, pervasive, inextricable, and lasting that it is a veritable “hyperobject,” too expansive to fully conceive of even as it unceasingly impacts our world in noticed and unnoticed ways.2
Harnessing and exploiting energy requires the use of technology, so that energy humanities as a field is based in part on studying technologies: the many ways we imagine and interact with them, and the myriad intended and unintended effects they have on the world. Hence, while his work does not directly address energy, Jürgen Habermas’s theorization of technology can serve as a lens for a clearer reading of our carbon-intensive era. In the late 1960s, he drew from critical theorists before him to analyze the depoliticization and subjection of society promoted by the reification and deification of technology and science.3 Since Habermas’s writings, many have continued to view large infrastructural and energy systems not as apolitical, technological arrangements but as complicated networks that actively transform not only nature but also society based on distinct ideological visions.4 Infrastructure and other forms and practices of technology are the very means by which energy has been exploited and consumed since the industrial revolution, and as Timothy Mitchell has shown, these practices also stand as a physical and discursive dispositif for exercising (bio)political power.5 Similar pretenses to positivism and the structures of governmentality built around these pretenses have underpinned seminal works on the precarities and instability—or “liquidity”—of modern industrial and post-industrial societies.6 Building on these and related analyses, scholars across disciplines have begun interrogating the continuum of energy exploitation, global warming, and carbon-dependent culture. In the process, they have shown how mammoth a task breaking out of the current carbon-capitalist order could be.
In the series here, all the authors in one form or another place technology at the heart of energy humanities as they answer questions about the risk and vulnerability produced by our modern, technocratic, and carbon-intensive production systems and lifestyles. In parallel, they propose possibilities for outlasting the current energy crises and associated social transformations, environmental disasters, and human-driven climate change. Together, they provide composed and flexible responses to Boyer and Szeman’s call to “first, grasp the full intricacies of our imbrication with energy systems (and with fossil fuels in particular), and second, map out other ways of being, behaving, and belonging in relation to both old and new forms of energy.”7 Importantly, three of the texts invoke the specific role of education, whether in formal terms at institutions of higher learning or informal terms through cultural projects aimed at lay audiences, as education serves as a conduit and catalyst for a committed engagement with carbon pasts, presents, and futures. The remaining reflections seek to untangle the ways in which societies face their respective petro-dependencies—practically or intellectually—to imagine possible paths away from the current moment of anthropocentric resignation and instead towards greener and more equitable and democratic futures.
Articles in this series:
EH in Practice 1: Libraries and Laboratories: Teaching Energy Humanities in Literary Studies
EH in Practice 2: The World of Energy and The Myth of Containerization
EH in Practice 3: Museums and the Challenge of Cultural Decarbonization
EH in Practice 4: Preserving Oil: In Conversation with Educators at the Norwegian Petroleum Museum and Oil Museum of Canada
EH in Practice 5: Virtue Ethics and Ecosabotage
EH in Practice 6: The Rise and Fall of Energiewende: A Case Study in Horse Racing Syndrome
Notes
1. Imre Szeman and Dominic Boyer, eds., Energy Humanities: An Anthology (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017).
2. Ibid., 3.
3. Timothy Morton, Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World (University of Minnesota Press, 2013).
4. See, for instance, Jürgen Habermas, “Technik und Wissenschaft als ‚Idologie‘: Für Herbert Marcuse zum 70. Geburtstag am 19.VII.1968,” in Technik und Wissenschaft als “Ideologie” (Suhrkamp Verlag, 1969).
5. See, for instance, Nikhil Anand, Akhil Gupta, and Hannah Appel, eds., The Promise of Infrastructure (Duke University Press, 2018); and Dirk van Laak, Lifelines of Our Society: A Global History of Infrastructure (MIT Press, 2023).
6. Timothy Mitchell, Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil (Verso, 2011).
7. Ulrich Beck, Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity (Sage Publishing, 1992); Ulrich Beck, World at Risk (Polity Press, 2007); Ulrich Beck, The Metamorphosis of the World: How Climate Change Is Transforming Our Concept of the World (Polity Press, 2017); and Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Modernity (Polity Press, 2012).
8. Paulina Jaramillo, Suzana Kahn Ribeiro, Peter Newman, Subash Dhar, Ogheneruona E. Diemuodeke, Tsutomu Kajino, David S. Lee, Sudarmanto Budi Nugroho, Xunmin Ou, Anders Hammer Strømman, and Jake Whitehead, “Transport,” in Climate Change 2022: Mitigation of Climate Change. Contribution of Working Group III to the Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, IPCC, 2022, 7–31, https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg3/downloads/report/IPCC_AR6_WGIII_FullReport.pdf (accessed May 19, 2025).
