Attend on Zoom: https://uio.zoom.us/j/67842339860?pwd=hz9mretDoyG6O1YyMWlvy1cnur9GhB.1
Abstract:
In the 21st century, energy over-extraction figures in a huge range of personal, social, economic, and political contexts. Forest users worry about biodiversity depletion, agricultural scientists struggle against soil exhaustion, Euro-American populations debate widespread‚ burn-out’ symptoms at work, and fossil fuel wealth boosts rapacious wars. What happens if we follow these ideas and practices of ‚energy’ across these manifold contexts and scales? How might they be connected to large (but under-theorized?) ideas of how the world works, and what a healthy relationship between time, labour and our surroundings could mean?
This talk explores whether ‚burn-out‘ as a mental health descriptor allow us to travel scales and contexts in ways that enable new forms of mutual recognition. Can it serve as a base of imagined and practical solidarities, across class divides? Inspired by artistic and political practices of pre-figurative politics (as in: the efficacy of ‚playing‘ through what is possible, when nothing seems possible), I propose co-designing civic experiments that trial this idea. This work in progress draws on ethnographic fieldwork in rural Central Asia and coastal Canada, the Energy Humanities and Marxist-inspired writing on metabolisms, speed and scale.
Bio:
Jeanne Féaux de la Croix is an Associate Professor at the Institute for Social Anthropology at the University of Bern. She is the leader of the research project “Social Ocean Energy: A Social Learning Approach to Global Marine Renewable Infrastructures”. She is currently a visiting research fellow with NFRs fellesløft project ‚Anthropogenic Soils’ in Oslo, and developing research on burn-out at different scales, geared towards linking human, political, and planetary regeneration. Her publications include 'Iconic Places in Central Asia: the moral geography of pastures, dams and holy sites' (Transcript, 2017), 'The Central Asian World' with Madeleine Reeves (Routledge 2023), and 'Environmental Humanities in Central Asia' (Routledge 2023) with Beatrice Penati.