{"id":2285,"date":"2022-08-12T16:07:07","date_gmt":"2022-08-12T20:07:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/climatecommons\/?p=2285"},"modified":"2022-08-12T16:07:07","modified_gmt":"2022-08-12T20:07:07","slug":"call-for-proposals-teaching-the-energy-humanities-collection-due-oct-31","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/climatecommons\/2022\/call-for-proposals-teaching-the-energy-humanities-collection-due-oct-31\/","title":{"rendered":"Call for Proposals: “Teaching the Energy Humanities” Collection (due Oct. 31)"},"content":{"rendered":"

The following call for proposals is copied from the project page on the MLA website, found here<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

Proposals are invited for a volume in the MLA Options for Teaching series entitled\u00a0Teaching Energy Humanities<\/em>, edited by Debby Rosenthal and Jason Molesky.<\/p>\n

Cultures breathe energy. Energy humanities, a swiftly growing subfield of the environmental humanities, works to reveal\u2014and, perhaps, to remake\u2014the interrelationships between cultural practices and energy systems. How a society uses, produces, and distributes energy reflects, as well as shapes, its foundational structures and values. Questions of energy are always already questions of ethics, identity, narrative, and community\u2014in short, questions of culture that invite broad, interdisciplinary humanistic inquiry.<\/p>\n

Properly understood, then, scholarship and teaching about energy are the purviews of not only scientists and public policy experts but also literary theorists, art historians, musicologists, actors, philosophers, poets, and architects. Those working in such areas are well-equipped to situate our current energy regime in terms of its overdetermined social and historical bases in, for example, colonialism, racial capitalism, and global class struggles. Yet energy humanities looks beyond concerns of climate change to consider, among other issues, the textual and cultural relations bound up with inputs like wood, whale oil, or the laboring muscles of human and nonhuman beings; the gendered politics of energy systems; the conflicts around historical energy transitions; or the artistic tensions and possibilities fostered by energy shifts such as the rise of steam power, mass electrification, or automobility.<\/p>\n

The word\u00a0power<\/em>\u00a0derives from the Latin\u00a0potere<\/em>, meaning \u201cto be able.\u201d Energy humanists recognize that extractivist practices are dually able to \u201cpower\u201d industrial capitalism and also \u201cpower\u201d structures of authority and influence over our societies. The unequal usage, distribution, and access to both kinds of power can reinforce inequity, as shown in many postcolonial texts about energy extraction. Such recent petrofiction and extractivist literatures have a rich history in earlier texts like Herman Melville\u2019s\u00a0Moby-Dick<\/em>, which asks us to consider how energy is made available through the imperial politics of natural resources. This textual lineage can also extend to modern, medieval, or classical literatures dealing with related concerns.<\/p>\n

Teaching Energy Humanities<\/em>\u00a0aims to help scholars and teachers equip themselves with practical strategies to incorporate themes of energy and extraction into humanities courses. Potential essay topics might include but are not limited to the following:<\/p>\n