Call for papers: AAG annual meeting, New York, 24-28 February 2012 *Energy and crises of capitalism* Mazen Labban (mazen.lab...@gmail.com)
Energy today occupies center stage in policy debates and the popular imagination, often coupled with ongoing crises of all sorts—volatile markets, violent conflicts, ecological destruction—and warnings about looming crises of cataclysmic proportions. In all its forms and guises, energy (as energy-related crises) is inseparable from its diverse socioecological and spatiotemporal settings and trajectories, and sans surprise energy-related questions have garnered growing interest among geographers. Some geographers have even called for thinking economic geographies as geographies of energy or, as Gavin Bridge puts it in reference to natural resources, thinking economies as “metabolic engines” for transforming a vast array of materials into commodities and wastes. This session responds to this call but also proposes taking the question of energy further in two moves. Research on energy in geography has almost exclusively concentrated on problems associated with the generation of power—the extraction and consumption of resources, particularly fossil fuels, on one end and greenhouse emissions and climate change on the other. As a first move this session opens the question of energy beyond the generation of power and broadens the conceptual field of vision to engage relevant research that is not normally classified under energy. As a second move, this session goes in the opposite direction and shifts the field of vision from thinking economies and energy systems as metabolic engines to problematizing them as specifically capitalist metabolic engines. And what better way is there to examine the working of this metabolic engine than to examine it when it's not working well—or, when it's working too well? Hence, this session proposes crisis as an entry point into investigating the working of the metabolic engine and entwining energy and energy-related crises with capitalist crises. If you would like to participate in this session send me an abstract (abiding by AAG guidelines) and your AAG PIN by 19 September at mazen.lab...@gmail.com. All conceptual and theoretical approaches are welcome, particularly those challenging existing views on energy and/or crisis, at any scale and in any empirical-historical setting. A conversation on this topic will begin at the Critical Geography Conference at Clark University; because the call for contributions to the critical geography conference generated interest in the potential extension of this conversation to the AAG meeting, for consistency I'm including here the triggers I suggested in the earlier call for contributions: Energy crises as capitalist crises; Energy and crises of accumulation; Energy and crises of regulation; Energy and crises of social reproduction; Energy derivatives: contradictions of energy as money; Energy forecasting and the politics of space-time; Uneven development of the energy mix: substitution dynamics, energy transitions, etc; Uneven development of world energy markets: global governance, financial flows, etc; Uneven geography of nuclear energy—or meltdown in Japan, moratorium in Europe, enrichment and Stuxnet in Iran; Uneven geography of sink functions: waste as site of accumulation, waste as site of crisis; Science and technology as capital: Efficiency/intensity, clean fuels, etc; Energy and the ecological crisis: climate change, spills, nuclear fallout; Convenient truths: the limits of capitalism with an environmental face, or Al Gore as environmental crisis; Alternative, renewable, sustainable: new bubbles? Energy and modernity: crises of progress and everyday life; 5-hour energy drinks, the working day and the exploitation of labour in the new economy; Energy as an aesthetic problem—or, do you really fancy wind farms?; Energy and biopolitics; Obesity as energy crisis; Energy and the legitimation crisis of the bourgeois state; Energy and crises of security: terrorism, nuclear proliferation, etc; The (geo)political uses of scarcity — “peak everything”: omg or lol? Biofuels and food: land use/land cover change, agrarian economies, hunger, land grabs, etc; Energy, poverty and inequality—energy poverty and the war on subsidies; Energy and radical politics: resistance, protest, uprising (in relation to any of the above); Fighting capitalist energy; Energy against capitalism; Energy beyond capitalism; …
