Sunday, August 6th
April 25, 2025
In our latest Theory piece, independent curator and writer Vanina Saracino examines how speculative visions of “human photosynthesis” in science fiction unsettle dominant ideas of energy, labor, and survival under capitalism. Through her close readings of Philip K. Dick, Kōbō Abe, and Kim Stanley Robinson, she traces how human metabolic independence emerges as a radical counter to fossil-fuel dependence, challenging extractive logics of growth, consumption, and exploitation while gesturing toward new political, economic, and ecological relations.
Can Canada mine its way to a green economy? In this EH feature, Isaac Thornley examines the contradictions of Ontario’s mines-to-mobility strategy, revealing how calls for economic nationalism serve to mask extractive policies and corporate subsidies. Centered on Ontario’s “Ring of Fire,” the province’s EV battery vision bypasses Indigenous consent, endangers critical peatland ecosystems, and reinscribes the colonial patterns/logic it claims to disrupt.
The hydrogen economy is often imagined as a clean energy solution but its foundations remain tied to fossil fuels. Doctoral researcher Dominique Arsenault traces the ways hydrogen development—particularly through blue hydrogen—reinforces existing oil and gas infrastructure, prolonging fossil fuel dependence under the guise of transition. From Canada’s hydrogen exports to Germany to industry backed visions of a hydrogen-powered future, the promise of decarbonization may be little more than a delay tactic.
Rachel Webb Jekanowski, Giulia Champion, and Mikala Hope-Franklyn uncover how the Gothic—a genre steeped in themes of hauntings, monstrosity, and the uncanny—offers a critical lens for examining the racial and colonial injustices embedded in green energy narratives. At the 2024 International Gothic Association Conference, they introduced a storytelling RPG to investigate how these inequalities permeate policy and public discourse. How might the Gothic expose the systemic power dynamics shaping the push for a "just" energy transition?
Helios is an EH interview series about new research in the energy humanities and the creative processes that bring it to life. In this fifth installment, Nicholas Carby-Denning interviews University of Toronto political scientists Teresa Kramarz and Donald Kingsbury about their book Populist Moments and Extractivist States in Venezuela and Ecuador: The People's Oil? (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021). Although this conversation took place in late 2022, its exploration of energy and populist politics continues to resonate in late 2024.
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