Cara New Daggett, Swaralipi Nandi and Jennifer Wenzel about alternative models of climate action that centre care and critical thought.   

Cara Daggett is a political theorist who teaches at Virginia Tech. Her research on feminist approaches to science and technology, and her writing on the politics of energy and the environment, has been extremely impactful. Her book The Birth of Energy and her writing on what she’s influentially called “petromasculinity” aren’t just widely cited, but serve as a guide for thinking about the problem of energy. 

Swaralipi Nandi is an Assistant Professor of English at Loyola College. Her work involves energy humanities in the context of India, exploring questions of a colonial past, environmentalism of the global South, and diasporic labour in the oil fields of the Gulf.  She’s the editor of The Postnational Fantasy: Essays on Postcolonialism, Cosmopolitics, and Science Fiction and Spectacles of Blood: A Study of Violence and Masculinity in Postcolonial Films. 

Jennifer Wenzel is a professor of postcolonial theory and environmental and energy humanities at Columbia University. Her books include Bulletproof: Afterlives of Anticolonial Prophecy in South Africa and Beyond and The Disposition of Nature: Environmental Crisis and World Literature.  

In this discussion you’ll hear Jennifer, Swaralipi and Cara work through a certain “cultural preference for… heroic action,” and critically consider the question of degrowth as a messy, complicated and consequential way of thinking around the catastrophe of relentless fossil fuel consumption.   If, as Jennifer puts it, our “dreams and expectations” are “attached to the energy regimes of the present,” what different sort of “everyday are we fighting for?” Can more “daring” stories and more “chaotic” experiments stave off the seemingly inevitable amnesia that allows the current system to persist? If we have all the ideas and technologies we need, then what is missing?