Workshop – Futures Beyond Transition: Perspectives from the Energy Humanities

View the final program here (pdf 2.1 MB) .

As climate impacts accelerate and both fossil fuel emissions and new investments in fossil infrastructure climb, the climate emergency intensifies. Across the scientific, social scientific, and humanistic research communities, increasingly dire warnings resound, and frontline communities struggle to cope. Yet business as usual not only continues. It’s expanding.

A growing body of scholarship has begun to challenge the optimistic imaginaries that have long shaped notions of the green transition. This two-day gathering aims to expand this growing critique through a series of invited presentations about research and teaching projects and collaborations that explore the intellectual and material roots of the green transition discourse, its present inertia, and futures beyond transition.

We thus invite scholars and activists working on energy-related themes to explore diverse epistemologies, conceptual approaches, and methodologies and practices to critique and imagine histories and futures beyond green transition narratives and practices. We welcome diverse contributions, including—but not limited to—perspectives from local communities, activist movements, and critical field sites central to reimagining energy futures. Presentations, workshops, or other modes of engagement might show and/or tell about energy humanities research creation projects, campus-community partnerships for energy justice, theorizations beyond transition, art-science activisms working for worlds beyond transition, and more.

The gathering will serve as an incubator for a special issue dedicated to thinking beyond transition and its fossil logics. Together we aim to build open access conceptual and practical tools to support futures beyond transition.