Energy Futures

Everyday life as we knew it is increasingly challenged in a world of climate, social, health and political crisis. Emerging technologies, data analytics and automation open up new possibilities which have implications for energy generation, storage and energy demand. To support these changes we urgently need to rethink how energy will be sourced, shared and used. Yet existing approaches to this problem, driven by engineering, data analytics and capital, are dangerously conservative and entrenched.

Energy Futures critically evaluates this context, and the energy infrastructures, stakeholders, and politics that participate in it, to propose plausible, responsible and ethical modes of encountering possible energy futures. Imagining anthropocene challenges, emerging technologies and everyday life otherwise through empirically grounded studies, opens up possible energy futures.

Energy Futures proposes and demonstrates a new critical and interventional futures-oriented energy anthropology. Combining the theories and methods of futures anthropology with the critical expertise and perspectives of energy anthropology creates a powerful mode of engagement, which this book argues is needed to disrupt the dominant narratives about our energy futures. Its contributors collectively reveal and evidence through innovative ethnographic practice how new knowledge about imagined and possible energy futures can be mobilised in engagements with emerging technologies, anthropocene challenges and everyday realities.

In doing so it brings together authors, analytical expertise and ethnographic evidence from the global south, north and places in between, generated through innovative methodologies including remote video and comic strip methods and documentary video practice as well as long term fieldwork.

• Presents a new conceptual framework for a futures-focused energy anthropology
• Shows how energy futures are imagined across different stakeholders
• Reveals the different scales, spatialities & temporalities of different imaginaries of energy futures

Simone Abram, Durham, UK; Karen Waltorp, Copenhagen, Denmark; Nathalie Ortar, ENTPE, France; Sarah Pink, Monash, Australia.

"Energy Futures shows us that not only do we need to be thinking deeply about our shared energy horizons but that we need to act, collectively, against the complicities of colonialism, technophilic solutions and capitalist logics so entrenched in regimes of energy. The authors, all leading thinkers in the field, offer exceptional insights on how energies and futures are entangled with experience as well as expectation, and they skillfully argue that anthropology needs to be a critical voice in these larger geopolitical debates."

Cymene Howe, Rice University, Houston, Texas