If the study of religion has been organized around a desire to understand and account for the ceremonial, ritual, metaphysical, animist, spiritual, or theological dimensions of human life, much of this knowledge has been gained through extractivist methodologies or approaches infused with an extractivist ethos. The ethnographic and interpretive methodologies that constitute so much of the social sciences and humanities reflect systems of knowledge production in which scholars extract value from raw sources. The same could be said more broadly of many epistemologies—that they assume a form of “mental fracking” (Marder, 2017), of seeking a real or true beyond, behind, or under the veil of a surface.
In this session, the Energy, Extraction, and Religion seminar has gathered an interdisciplinary group of junior and senior scholars to reflect on these methodological and epistemological challenges in pre-distributed papers and in-person responses.
Linda Martín Alcoff highlighted the non-relational character of extractivist epistemologies that generates extractivist practices. In re-evaluating epistemic assumptions and counteracting extractivist epistemologies, she offers alternate epistemic norms for the disciplinary dialogue. However, I will argue that not all disciplines are willing to accept such norms, not because of the unfeasibility or impracticality of these norms but because the "inner spirit" of epistemological ideals of these disciplines is not congruent with these alternate epistemic norms. Therefore, before proceeding towards dialogue with the other epistemologies, practitioners must identify the centrality of the interpretative character of knowledge and, through this introspection, recognize the possibility of dialogue. To demonstrate these points, philosophically, I will employ Charles Sanders Peirce's understanding of "reasoning" and how knowledge is attained. Historically, I will present an example of the Translation Movement in the 8th-century Islamic world as the epistemic practice that dialogued with other ways of knowing.
In this brief presentation, I sketch a theoretical framework and agenda for decarbonizing theology. Drawing from work in the energy humanities, the framework focuses on the cultural aspects of energy transition—the transformation of petroculture, a transition in speech, values, and practices. The agenda I propose for decarbonizing theology foregrounds three types of questions: To what degree have the study and practice of theology and ethics been “carbonized,” that is, how have they been shaped by the use of fossil fuels for heat, energy, motion, and raw material? What, if anything, is worth sustaining from carbon theology, and what should be rejected through a process of decarbonization? What might such a therapy of decarbonization involve—what practices, habits of speech, values, materials, and relationships will decarbonize theology and repair its damage? The first question is historical in nature, the second analytical and evaluative, and the third normative and constructive.
Fully appreciating the complexities of modern human engagement with energy requires an understanding and analysis of extraction. But beyond issues of resource exploitation and the labor of energy industry employees, to what degree are the scholars who study extraction also involved in extractive practices, taking the experiences of community members and transforming them into scholarly products to be consumed by academic audiences with little to no benefit for the communities under investigation? This paper argues that scholarship related to energy and extraction must critically engage its inherited methods to better understand how scholars are implicated in extractive dynamics. I point to insights from the field of Appalachian Studies to articulate a general framework for addressing the exploitative history of some academic research approaches. I conclude that research approaches guided by restorative justice can correct past harms and build more just and collaborative research futures with communities shaped by energy extraction.
This presentation proposes that examples of visual culture that portray religious sites in or near mines exhibit ambivalence between the notion that mining brings local prosperity, and that mining is a dangerous industry for workers and for the environment. After all, religious sites represent both the workers’ genuine spiritual homes and were instruments of labor discipline and oppression. The site where they offer la labor de sus cuerpos no solo de sus manos (the labor of their bodies, not just their hands, as the AAR theme suggests), is one of many contradictions.
After offering this background it focuses on photographs and self-distributed documentaries of Our Lady of the Rosary in Ouro Preto, Minas Gerais, Brazil. As I examine these images, I would invite seminar members to enter a conversation about how these examples, and others like them, may allow workers to confront their unsafe working conditions and associated environmental devastation.
From the multidisciplinary project Translatability of Oil (TOIL) (https://www.hf.uio.no/iln/english/research/projects/translatability-of-oil/index.html) based at the University of Oslo, Norway, with research examining how petroleum oil has been represented and interpreted through fiction, didactic texts, media, and religious practice over the last century, this presentation offers theological reflections on unsustainable modes of extractivism in order to help reimagine landscapes toward new ways of translating oil in the contemporary world. Drawing upon how the physical substance oil is given a spiritual meaning in religious settings, hermeneutical tools are located therein to draw upon for the work of dismantling petroleum-based cultures in ways that might reanimate sacred landscapes today, working toward a constructive theology of energy justice.
In the energy humanities, extraction is often understood to be a collection of practices that facilitate nonreciprocal acts of removal, accumulation, and domination. As a form of worldmaking, extractivism alters environments by privileging narratives of accumulation and mastery, often justifying environmentally damaging acts of extraction as necessary evils. In many ways, academic scholarship in the humanities is scaffolded onto a similar set of narratives; traditional formats for sharing knowledge such as the conference panel or the peer review journal publication fix notions of professional success, encouraging emergent scholars to view research itself in terms of individual losses and gains. In the neoliberal university, pressures around productivity and intellectual mastery dictate boundaries between value and the waste, just as they do in natural environments. In this paper, I draw from discourses of extractivism within the energy humanities and environmental media studies to consider how extractivism manifests in academic publishing and presentation. In particular, I attend to spaces of academic professionalization as involved in acts of prospecting—the constraining of how academic careers and futures are imagined.