There are few concerns as important in contemporary politics as energy, that vital force. Whether approached as a thing to be changed (e.g. the energy transition (Love and Garwood 2013; Lennon 2021)); a dependency to be disentangled (Petrova and Phillips 2021); an inequality to be corrected for (Gupta 2015), or a solution to myriad troubles earnestly sought (Folch 2015) energy maintains a topical liveliness that shimmers with a power far beyond its modest scientific definition as “the ability to do work” (“Energy, Physics” 2023). Anthropologists, like scholars from many fields, have in recent decades been drawn to energy for all of these reasons. Energy has an analytic light that allows for new approaches to many enduring anthropological concerns. Centering a study on energy, for example, makes it easier to track how abstractions like power move and manifest (Boyer 2019), or how money gains and exploits its value (Günel 2014; Appel 2012) or how morals are negotiated enforced and abandoned (Günel 2019; High 2019). Anthropologists are, that is to say, principally concerned with energy’s ineffable effects. Invisible, yet sensible relations – like time (Winther 2008; Hiroki 2019; Ahmann 2019), value (Hornborg 1992; Phillips 2022), magic (Coronil 1997; Weszkalnys 2013), power (Boyer 2014), and hope (Enslev, Mirsal, and Winthereik 2018) are often at the heart of anthropological studies of energy, binding these studies to deeper, though rarely explicitly excavated older notions of energy critical to the field (Coleman 2019). This understanding that magic and energy (Gell 1988), mana and power (Mazzarella 2017), esteem and calories (Rappaport 1971), activity and community (Dale and Karlsson 2019; Ahmann 2018) form the heart of this class, which is devoted to understanding what anthropology specifically has to offer social scientific investigations of energy systems in transition.
The course will be taught in English; Students may write in English, German, or French.
The seminar will take place in room 312.
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