Energy, Extraction, and Religion Seminar
In the third year of our seminar we would like to focus on interdisciplinary conversations and connections. Specifically, what insights do discourses like energy/extraction humanities or petroculture studies bring to the study of religion? Conversely, what do religion and theological studies bring to these discourses and modes of analysis that have been generally overlooked? How can connections between religious / theological studies and other areas of environmental humanities be approached as opportunities for exchange and mutual benefit, rather than extractive transaction?
With this overarching theme in mind, our June online session will focus on conversations around key energy/extraction humanities texts. The session will include breakout room discussions, each focused on a different text that will be distributed prior to the meeting for pre-reading. Presiders will introduce texts and lead discussions, summarizing insights when breakout groups reconvene.
We invite proposals of key texts that would be generative for the Energy, Extractivism, and Religion Seminar. Proposals might include:
- a text with important insights for religion scholars to build from, like a key text for energy humanities discourses;
- a commonly cited text within energy humanities/petroculture studies that needs the critical engagement of religion scholars;
- a text from religious studies or theology that is fecund for energy/environmental humanities.
Because proposed texts will be distributed to participants before the session, they should be digitally accessible (the seminar steering committee can assist with this) and relatively brief (e.g. a chapter or journal article of ~ 20-30 pgs.).
In the proposal, explain what the text is and why you think religion scholars should know of and engage this text; and
why you are the person to give some informed framing of the text and lead constructive discussion of it.
Review Process
Proposer names are visible to chairs and steering committee members at all times
This seminar provides an intellectual space to foreground relations, dynamics, and critiques among religion, energy, and extraction. For scholars in a variety of humanistic and social scientific disciplines, extractivism provides a conceptual rubric through which to re-conjoin analyses of racialization and exploitation with concerns about ecology and sustainability. This is particularly the case in the environmental and energy humanities. In light of multidisciplinary scholarly discourses on extractivism, this seminar aims to conscientiously link social and ecological justice questions as a matter of theoretical and methodological rigor; to explicitly and directly attend to racial capitalism and coloniality as constitutive of environmental crises; to facilitate and improve dialogue between religion scholars and the environmental humanities, focusing attention on the religious dimensions of energy intensive and extractive cultures; and engage in reflexive analyses of the study and constructions of religion in, with, and through cultures of energy and extractivism.
| Chair | Dates | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| Evan Berry, Arizona State University | evan.berry@asu.edu | - | View |
| Terra Schwerin Rowe | terra.rowe@unt.edu | - | View |