Energy and the Left
A Workshop on Energy Studies in New York City

Deadline:           20 December 2016
Event’s Date:     14 April 2017
Location:            NYU, Washington Square campus
Organisers:        Daniela Russ (Columbia University) and Troy Vettese (NYU)

What is the relationship between the creation of new energy-system infrastructure and opportunities for leftist struggles? Recent events have brought this to the forefront--such as efforts to thwart the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline--but this relationship has a much longer history. This debate brings together approaches of the environmental humanities, the ‘new materialism’, labour history, STS, and business history in novel ways, centering on questions of power and struggle that sharpen during energy transitions.
While the historiography of energy studies of the 1990s was often more focussed on tracing which businessmen captured the ‘prize’ of elephant petroleum deposits, or tracing energy transitions, or orientalising Middle Eastern ‘petro-dictatorships’, new work has centred on questions of power and struggle that sharpen during energy transitions.
Recent important studies at the intersection of energy and the Left include Timothy Mitchell’s Carbon Democracy, which thoroughly demolishes the myth of the ‘oil curse’. For Mitchell, coal-based networks were vulnerable to strikes, while petroleum-based infrastructure were impervious, both systems playing a determining role in the shape of democratic practice in consuming and producing countries. Andreas Malm’s Fossil Capital goes back further in time to present an alternate narrative of the first industrial revolution in Britain. He argues that the transition to coal from water-power was a political response to the threat of labour militancy. Coal then closed off opportunities before opening them up in Mitchell’s period of the 1890s. By tracing the evolution of the linkages between energy, class, and space over time both Malm and Mitchell reveal how clashing workers and capitalists exploited the physical infrastructure of that nearly intangible thing: energy. These are, however, only two possible approaches to the study of energy history--what are the many other ways to reshape the field?
    This one-day workshop will take place at NYU’s Washington Square campus on 14 April 2017. Scholars living in the Greater New York region (and as far away as limited travel subsidies extend this boundary) are welcome to present their work on what is a rapidly evolving field. Papers will be circulated beforehand and everyone will be paired with a discussant. Depending on the coherence of the papers assembled, a joint publication of a book or special journal issue could be contemplated.
    Please apply by 20 December 2016. Notifications of acceptance will be sent out within a month. Prepared papers should be circulated a month before the workshop. Please send a three-hundred word abstract and a short CV to Troy (tgv208@nyu.edu) and Daniela (druss@uni-bonn.de) with the subject line ‘Energy and the Left’.