Call for Papers (EN)

Argument

Energy, before being a concept taken from physics, is a concrete, everyday reality for humans who depend on it for food, transportation, lighting, heating, production, and entertainment (Rinkinen, Shove, and Marsden 2020). More than in kilowatt-hours, joules and British Thermal Units (BTUs), the materiality of energy (Jones 2018) manifests itself through switches, sockets, appliances, boilers, gas stations, oil deposits, mines, transmission lines, or nuclear power plants that profoundly transform relations between humans, space, landscapes, and environments. The physical and multisensory manifestations of energy materialize themselves in physical and social space and take place within a variety of landscapes, whether urban, rural, industrial, or agricultural, populated or abandoned (Castán Broto 2019; Jørgensen and Jørgensen 2018; Parr 2009). While they play a major role in shaping and transforming these landscapes, energy infrastructures are themselves shaped by landscapes and the people that inhabit them.

This one-day workshop will explore the relationships between energy and landscapes, using approaches drawn from the human and social sciences. It is structured around a number of questions designed to highlight these relations under different angles:

• How do energy infrastructures shape landscapes and land?

• How do landscapes influence energy systems?

• How do energy and territorial changes influence relations of power and domination?

• What are the environmental, social, economic, and political consequences of the energy and landscape choices made by human societies?

• What is the role of business, the State, social movements, and various interest groups in shaping energy landscapes?

• What role can the humanities and social sciences play in the study of energy transitions and material change?

The disciplines of the human and social sciences, while not often mobilized in this way, provide the tools necessary to understand the concrete, material, and spatial effects of energy change on landscapes and land. These changes are obviously linked to political, ideological, and cultural frameworks that shape our understanding of energy and landscapes. We are interested in what these two types of approach — material and ideal — have to say about the interweaving of energy and landscapes.

Canada is a particularly relevant space to work on these issues, although we are open to contributions exploring other geographical areas. Conceived since European colonization as an immense landscape of bounty, Canada has become a space of Indigenous dispossession and extraction of natural and energy resources, from timber to hydroelectricity (Castonguay 2011; 2023; Dagenais 2022; Poitras 2006; Sandwell 2016). This path dependence has brought deep consequences for Indigenous peoples and the natural landscapes and ecosystems which they have inhabited for millennia (Desbiens 2014; Gagnon and Desbiens 2018; Luby 2020). It has also shaped the lifestyles of settlers, marked by an abundant production and consumption of energy and land resources. To this day, the Canadian population consumes an impressive amount of energy and land compared to other populations with similar standards of living.

In the last twenty years, two edited volumes produced in Québec have taken up the concept of landscape (territoire) to reflect on its links with business (Bellavance and Lanthier 2004) and power (Bérubé and Savard 2017). This workshop builds and expands upon this work to link energy — often treated from the angle of representations and cultural studies (Perron 2006) — with material and spatial reflections. In particular, we call on proposals to take seriously the territorialization of energy, i.e. studies using specific and localized case studies to interrogate larger planetary issues (Jaglin 2017).

Paper proposals should draw on the critical and empirical perspective of the humanities and social sciences (history, geography, urban studies and planning, sociology, political science, anthropology, economics, environmental studies, etc.). They may be formulated by master's and PhD students, postdoctoral researchers, independent researchers, CEGEP and university professors, members of associations and activists, civil servants, or any other field mobilizing social approaches to energy and landscapes.

Areas of analysis

1. Landscapes of extraction and production

Energy has to be extracted from nature to be used by human societies. Oilfields, gas fields, rivers and watersheds, forests, wind farms, uranium and coal mines, peat bogs, landfills, cornfields: in these different landscapes, humans extract energy and put nature to work. Some of these sites of extraction and production are hotbeds of urbanization and industrialization (Gelly and Desloges 2002), fostering communities that flourish or break up as the exploitation of available resources evolves (Keeling 2010). This exploitation is carried out by machines and workers, who develop identities and cultures rooted in landscapes of extraction, sometimes transforming them into sites of struggle and mobilization for better living conditions (van Horssen 2016). Processes of energy extraction and production often prove environmentally and socially destructive, creating sacrificed landscapes that concentrate the bulk of pollution and toxicity to tend to landscapes of consumption (Arboleda 2020; Davies 2018; Mah 2023; Patinaux 2023; Seow 2021). The people living and working in these sacrificed zones often come from marginalized groups, highlighting the multiple power relations implied by energy landscapes (Waldron 2018; Wiebe 2017).

2. Landscapes of transportation

Since cities, voracious consumers of energy and resources, are often located far from landscapes of extraction, transportation infrastructure is needed to bring energy to end users (Kroot 2024). Transportation infrastructure includes high-voltage transmission lines, pipelines, rivers, ships, railroads, roads, and highways. Landscapes of transportation often highlight unequal and conflicting metabolic relationships between city and countryside, centrality and periphery, metropolis and hinterland (Barry 2013; Benson 2015; Hein 2021; Kheraj 2020; Kim and Barles 2012; Naumann and Rudolph 2020; Needham 2014; Prémont and Proulx 2020).

3. Landscapes of transformation

From its raw form related to extraction to its final form related to consumption, energy must be transformed. This transformation involves handling, alteration, and storage activities that require space, involve human labor and produce nuisances and pollutions (Bécot and Le Naour 2023; Hein 2018; Morisset 1998). Spatial embodiments of energy transformation activities include power plants, oil refineries, gasometers, electrical substations, wood and coal yards, waste incinerators, data centers, and slaughterhouses. These sites are vectors of visibilization for energy infrastructure, often described as invisible on an urban scale (French 2017; Karvonen and Guy 2018; Lopez 2019).

4. Landscapes of consumption

If human societies work so hard to extract, transport, and transform energy, it’s because it provides them with energy services that are essential to human life: heat and work, which enable heating and cooling, food cooking and refrigeration, and the operation of machines to move around and produce goods and services (Fell 2017; Shove 2010). Certain landscapes lend themselves particularly well to the study of energy consumption practices: the domestic sphere at housing level, the commercial sphere at store level, and the industrial sphere at factory level (Bouzarovski and Petrova 2015; Cowan 1983). In these landscapes, consumers come into contact with energy and influence energy transition pathways through their consumption choices. These choices are shaped by cultural norms, social expectations, gendered and racial apprehensions, and political ideologies (Moore and Sandwell 2021). Despite Canada's situation of energy abundance, numerous social groups experience energy poverty (Riva et al. 2024).

5. Landscapes of abandonment

Sites where energy is extracted, transported, transformed, and consumed are sometimes abandoned when their usefulness is exhausted or their value diminishes. Their operators might leave behind devastated landscapes, often under the indifferent eye of the state. Assessing the extent of their toxicity, assigning responsibility, and determining decontamination techniques give rise to conflicts, negotiations, and sometimes arrangements (Henni 2024; Müller 2023; Patinaux 2021; Williams 2024). Energy landscapes hit by deindustrialization and abandonment, from orphan wells to decommissioned refineries, highlight the relationships between landscapes of energy and waste. Industrial energy landscapes, during their heyday or after their dereliction, are sometimes subject to processes of patrimonialization, conservation, and rehabilitation that generate community mobilizations and planning conflicts (Marrec 2024).

6. Landscapes of conceptualization and contestation

The material deployment of energy systems is subject to multiple forms of expertise and authority, bringing different professions and bodies of knowledge to the table (Moss 2020). These different ways of understanding energy systems and their consequences, often in opposition to each other, generate spaces of contestation (Van Neste and Couture-Guillet 2024). Landscapes of conceptualization and contestation of energy systems include the meeting rooms of firms, ministries and non-governmental organizations, public space for demonstrations, recording studios for radio and TV programs, film sets, map rooms, exhibition spaces, and museums. It is in these spaces and elsewhere that people, claiming different forms of expertise, knowledge, and authority, intervene and contest the planning and territorialization of energy systems (Barber 2020; Chatterjee 2024; Turnbull 2023; Wright 2023).

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