Helios 2: Anne Pasek on Changing Methods in a Changing Climate

12 Min Read

July 13, 2021

Helios is an EH interview series about new research in the energy humanities and the creative processes that bring it to life.

Our second installment features Anne Pasek, Assistant Professor and Canada Research Chair in Media, Culture, and the Environment at Trent University in Peterborough, ON. Anne’s wide-ranging research interests include the cultural politics of climate change, environmental communication, and rethinking academic research norms in a warming world. In addition to multiple book projects, she is currently founding the Trent Low-Carbon Research Lab.

EH editor Caleb Wellum sat down with Anne over Zoom on June 10 to talk about the methodological concerns, approaches, and experiments that inform her work. During the hourlong interview, they discussed critical making, the materiality of digital tech, and the importance of critical empathy in divided times.

Click the download link below to read the full interview.

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

Read More

June 6, 2025

Hélène Ducros & Nicholas Ostrum

This series introduction situates energy humanities in a rapidly changing global context marked by war, climate disasters, political backlash, and stalled transitions. Revisiting the foundational claims of Szeman and Boyer’s Energy Humanities (2017), Hélène Ducros and Nicholas Ostrum argue that technology functions both as infrastructure and as ideology, shaping how energy systems have come to structure modern life. The essays that follow examine how energy informs culture, pedagogy, politics, and ethics, and how new ways of thinking might point toward more just and sustainable futures.

Read
September 17, 2024

Jackson Ainsworth

Nuclear energy is haunted by a legacy of fear and toxicity that fossil fuels seem to escape. In this piece, Jackson Ainsworth asks why. While nuclear disasters dominate cultural memory, fossil fuels—despite their clear environmental destruction—rarely provoke the same visceral reactions. Ainsworth dissects how media and history have cemented nuclear’s toxic image and challenges why fossil fuel pollution isn’t met with the same alarm. Why has toxicity discourse attached so strongly to nuclear power, but not to fossil fuels?

Read
all articles