Kosma Lechowicz: Retooling human-energy entanglements: A grounded exploration of Polish coal regions in transition

Abstract

In this thesis, I take a grounded approach to investigating entanglements of people and natural resources in Polish coal regions in transition. I argue that retooling socio-material relations valued by local communities can prevent the reproduction of extractivist logics, and contribute to reconfiguring the human-energy relationship. I deploy ethnographic methods to explore the role of material resources, infrastructures and environments in shaping visions of good life, meanings, values, sociality, and relations of labour in Upper Silesia and Eastern Greater Poland. In paper I, I put Sociotechnical Imaginaries in conversation with Object-Oriented Ontology and find that dominant imaginaries of coal can be productively disassembled when residents of coal regions engage in practices of attunement (acknowledging the complexity of coal’s effects on local identity, social order and cultural practices) and subscendence (relational and context-sensitive experimentation which builds alliances between different social groups and nonhumans). In paper II, I find that proximity to coal and the entanglement with its materialities foster a distinct imaginary with two overlapping dimensions: one where coal features as a community-binding material and a guarantor of stability and another where it functions as a transmitter of connection to the environment and respect for the fragility of the metabolic relationship with nature. In paper III, I draw on the Marxist notion of alienation via labour process and find that workers of the mining industry in Upper Silesia actively pursue conscious life activity, form unexpected alliances, desire social orders based on collective wellbeing, and emphasise that the purpose of energy work should be to meet human needs. Paper IV applies the STI-OOO conversation to both regions and finds that: 1) material experiences of places of energy production contain seeds of alternative imaginaries grounded not in technological substitution or rupture, but in careful reworking of inherited socio-material attachments; 2) disassembling from within entails negotiations within the complex entanglements and working with these constraints rather than transcending them. Collectively, the papers show that natural environment and resources are not passive backgrounds to energy transitions but active participants who can open alleyways to disassembling dominant energy imaginaries and aid transformation towards less extractivist futures.