Carbonscapes - disassembling the power of high-carbon imaginaries

The overall purpose of this project is to critically examine and better understand how powerful carbon-intensive imaginaries can be disassembled to accelerate low-carbon transition.

  • Period: 2021-01-01 – 2024-12-31
  • Budget: 10,386,000 SEK
  • Funder: Swedish Research Council
  • Type of funding: Project grant

Description

Landscapes and infrastructures designed to mobilize coal, oil, and gas cast a long shadow over society's ability to imagine a different energy future.

Fossil fuel consumption in the energy and industrial sectors remains the primary source of carbon dioxide emissions worldwide. There is a growing realization that a massive deployment of low-carbon energy systems will not help societies replace fossil fuels. The persistence of fossil fuels, such as coal and oil, cannot be prevented solely by creating new energy systems and the institutions that support them. Equal attention must be paid to dismantling old but powerful imaginaries surrounding fossil fuels, such as coal and oil.

This project fills gaps in social science research on energy transitions and energy futures. We do this by shifting the focus from predicting and constructing new, low-carbon energy systems to critically examining and dismantling old but still powerful fossil-intensive practices.

The overarching question in this study is how to dismantle the power of fossil-intensive imaginaries. By analysing and comparing four different fossil-intensive landscapes or "carbonscapes"—brown coal and hard coal extraction ("coalscapes") in central and southern Poland, and crude oil extraction and petrochemical production ("petroscapes") in northeastern Britain—the project will:

  1. identify and critically examine resistance to change, such as maintaining coal and oil as reimaginable or discursively reworked energy resources;
  2. reveal and critically examine the socio-material dynamics that have been assembled through coal and oil that constrain or enable the power to imagine the future;
  3. identify opportunities to dismantle and destabilize fossil fuel imaginaries in selected fossil-intensive landscapes.

The study combines three theoretical approaches:

  1. socio-technical imaginaries, which are used to identify how regional actors view desirable and possible consequences of technological and scientific development, and governmentality, which allows us to understand the power to imagine the future as a dynamic and circulating process that involves specific governance rationalities and governance technologies;
  2. assemblage, which helps us understand how different components of energy systems have been assembled, disconnected from each other, or reassembled in new configurations; and
  3. materialities, which allow us to realize that resources, such as coal and crude oil, take on powerful but contested meanings within a specific imaginary, which is in turn conditioned by the materialities themselves. The four empirical cases will be studied as four distinct fossil-intensive landscapes, based on scientific work on the concepts of "assemblage" and "carbonscapes". Analytical tools will include fieldwork, semi-structured interviews with relevant actors, observations, and discourse analysis of relevant documents.

Theoretically, the project contributes to a conceptual multi-perspective that transcends the boundaries of dominant theoretical frameworks. Empirically, the overall ambition is to lay the foundation for an atlas of fossil-intensive landscapes in energy transitions, which will stimulate scientific research on energy futures. Societally, the study provides in-depth analyses of regional energy futures that will assist regional policymakers, energy industry representatives, civil society, and supranational institutions.

The project aims to strengthen and further develop an international social science research environment involving two research institutions: the Department of Earth Sciences, Uppsala University, and the Department of Geography, Durham University.

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