About event

Join Associate Professor of Anthropology Gisa Weszkalnys for this Environmental Challenges Livestreamed SSN Seminar

Join the SSN as our Environmental Challenges stream hosts Associate Professor of Anthropology Gisa Weszkalnys (London School of Economics) for a seminar on propositional politics against of backdrop of a global climate emergency and energy transition. Gisa will be joined in conversation by Dr Timothy Neale after her talk. Join in the conversation and Q and A via YouTube Live chat, or on Twitter with #SSNseminar #environmentalchallenges.

Granite City Sunset: The Propositional Politics of Energy Transition in Aberdeen

Abstract

This paper considers the transformation of Aberdeen, Europe’s declared oil capital, against the backdrop of global climate emergency and an unfolding energy transition. Specifically, we examine the ambivalent responses to plans for an Energy Transition Zone (ETZ) situated adjacent to Aberdeen’s South Harbour expansion, the St.Fittick’s Park green belt, and the working-class neighbourhood of Torry. Backed by major Scottish and UK government funding and by what activists describe as a web of local corporate and political influence, the ETZ invokes future imaginaries of green recovery and just transition, undergirded by expert forecasts and innovative low-carbon technologies. By contrast, its opponents – including Friends of St. Fittick’s Park, climate activists, arts practitioners, and their allies – highlight how the ETZ will damage the areas ecology and exacerbate socioeconomic inequalities in the city. They organise protests and events, write Facebook posts, use smartphone video, songs, and greeting cards, pick litter and cultivate vegetables in a local community garden, and elicit stories and photos from residents and sympathisers. Their activities are inflected by personal biographies, experiences of environmental injustice, and debates over a just transition in the Scottish Northeast. While the ETZ is proffered as testbed for novel technomaterial and commercial opportunities, the activists’ responses query this effort at “temporal enclosure” (Jaramillo and Carmona 2022) with a propositional politics (Dányi et al. 2021) that exceeds its bounds.

Speaker Bio

Associate Professor Gisa Weszkalnys is an economic anthropologist with an interest in how the future figures in human practice. Her research pioneers an ethnographic analysis of future making as a political, material, and affective endeavour central to contemporary capitalism. She has carried out a number of significant research projects working both independently and in interdisciplinary teams. As an experienced field researcher, she uses a qualitative and mixed-methods toolkit including ethnography, interviewing, life history analysis, extended case studies, institutional histories, and archival research. She was a Leverhulme Research Fellow (2012-13), Visiting Researcher at the Institute for Social and Cultural Anthropology, Oxford University (2012-14), Visiting Fellow at the Zentrum Moderner Orient, Berlin (2015), and Visiting Scholar at Columbia University, New York (2016). Focused on Europe and West Africa, her research has explored how future imaginations and associated ethical orientations towards likely and unlikely things to come play out in techno-governmental practices and the cultural and material worlds shaped by them. Her first book , Alexanderplatz: Transforming Place in a Unified Germany (2010), examines the rapid remake of Berlin through the lens of city planning, following the fall of state socialism. The working title of her upcoming book is A Doubtful Hope: Oil, Wealth, and Time in Atlantic Africa.

Discussant Bio

Timothy Neale is an anthropologist and STS scholar whose research addresses two overlapping fields of inquiry. The first focuses on the politics of settler and Indigenous relations to lands and waters, and the second examines natural hazards and disasters with a particular interest in the social and cultural life of their technical infrastructures.

Timothy is currently an Editor of the journal Science, Technology & Human Values, and was a Global Editor (2019-2021) of the journal Postcolonial Studies. He is also a producer of the podcasts Conversations in Anthropology and Technoscience and was the Deputy Convener (2017-2020) and Convener (2020-2023) of the Deakin Science and Society Network, and is now a streamleader for Environmental Challenges .

Join in the conversation and Q and A via YouTube Live chat, or on Mastadon @SSN_Deakin #SSNseminar #Environmentalchallenges.