Energy Affects Theory Research Project
Launched in Spring 2022, the Energy and Affect Theory project called scholars to tackle cross cutting themes of affect, energy transition, and labor. Through two working groups and the dedicated efforts of Trish Kahle, Firat Oruc, and Victoria Googasian, the project resulted in a special issue of Regeneration: Environment, Art, Culture, published in 2025.
“Affects of Energy Transition” Special Issue
Energy transition is an increasingly contested and problematized concept in the energy humanities. Attending to energy transition’s affective angles can offer new insight into the concept’s critical utility as well as its limits.
Articles
- Trish Kahle, “Introduction: Affects of Energy Transition”
- Victoria Googasian, “Infrastructural Character: Space Opera’s Energy Imaginary”
- Anne Pasek, “Unalienating Carbon: Affect and Labour in Artisinal Carbon Removal Work”
- Ewan Gibbs, “Energy Workers in Transition: The Skilled Manual Workers’ Structure of Feeling in Britain’s Electricity, Nuclear, and Oil and Gas Sectors”
- Animesh Chatterjee, “Everyday Interpretations of Transitions to Electricity in Colonial Calcutta, c. 1875-1940s”
- Naomi Oreskes, Cymene Howe, Dominic Boyer, and Lacy M. Johnson, “How to Communicate Climate: New Experiments and Methods”
- Dominic Boyer, “Afterword: Less is the New More”
Workshops
Workshop I: May 24, 2022
Participants and Discussants:
- Georgetown University in Qatar Faculty Leads: Vicky Googasian, Trish Kahle, Firat Oruc
- Center for International and Regional Studies, Georgetown University in Qatar: Zahra Babar, Misba Bhatti, Elizabeth Wanucha
- Dominic Boyer, Rice University
- Animesh Chatterjee, Technische Universität Darmstadt
- Ewan Gibbs, University of Glasgow
- Anne Pasek, Trent University
Workshop II: September 5, 2022
Participants and Discussants:
- Georgetown University in Qatar Faculty Leads: Vicky Googasian, Trish Kahle, Firat Oruc
- Center for International and Regional Studies, Georgetown University in Qatar: Zahra Babar, Misba Bhatti, Elizabeth Wanucha
- Animesh Chatterjee, Technische Universität Darmstadt
- Ewan Gibbs, University of Glasgow
- Anne Pasek, Trent University