In this episode of Volatile Trajectories, you’ll hear from Rhys Williams, Stacey Balkan, and Tommy Davis about how their hope for “revolutionary forms of infrastructure,” to guard against disastrous futures and quickly accelerating climate collapse, hinges in certain ways on both an “aesthetic education that centralizes conversations about more hopeful futures” and moving beyond merely imagining alternatives to doing the political work necessary to bring them into being.

But let me give you some background on Tommy, Rhys and Stacey. Tommy Davis is an Associate Professor of English at Ohio State University where he teaches courses in modern and contemporary literature, environmental humanities, and coordinates study abroad programs to southern Louisiana and Antarctica. He’s the author of The Extinct Scene: Late Modernism and Everyday Life and he is currently finishing his second book, Unnatural Attachments: Aesthetic Education and Ecological Crisis. Rhys Williams is a Lecturer in Energy and Environmental Humanities at the University of Glasgow. He works on the intersection of narrative and infrastructure in future-making, especially with respect to food and energy. He has written extensively on solar infrastructures and imaginaries, most recently in the journals South Atlantic Quarterly and Open Library of the Humanities. And Stacey Balkan is an Associate Professor of Environmental Literature and Humanities at Florida Atlantic University where she also serves as an affiliate faculty member for the university’s Center for Peace, Justice, and Reconciliation. She is the author of Rogues in the Postcolony: Narrating Extraction and Itinerancy in India and co-editor, with Dr. Swaralipi Nandi, of Oil Fictions: World Literature and our Contemporary Petrosphere.

This conversation is a lively one, recorded at a fairly noisy bistro, with all the sounds of people playing pool and children’s shoes squeaking. They seem to harness the energy of that space to engage with questions around how we’ve been sold a certain narrative about the inevitability of fossil fuels. Tommy talks about how it might be the responsibility of the “energy humanities” and environmental communicators to “expose that configuration as historical” and work to unmake it. But at the same time, Rhys points out that it’s not as simple as just undoing a narrative or exposing a history of manipulation. We have to engage with the degree to which “petrocultural” ideology is now a firmly “material thing,” solidified as social and empirical fact. This makes it much harder to dislodge, but identifies the enemy of energy transition in a more substantive way.

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