Landscapes of Intensification

Moderated by Ryan Jobson, Department of Anthropology and CEGU, The University of Chicago
John Hope Franklin Room, Social Science Research Building
(2nd Floor, 1126 E. 59th St.)

Tremors of Freedom: Earthquakes, Dams, and Self-Determination in Modern India
Sachaet Pandey, Department of History, The University of Chicago

From Molecule to Market: Racial Hierarchies, Geologic Flows, and Louisiana’s Petro-Landscapes
Robin McDowell, Department of History, Wesleyan University

––––

About the Conference / Energy—Capital—Metabolism

Organized by the Committee on Environment, Geography and Urbanization and the Shapiro Initiative on Environment and Society, Department of History, The University of Chicago
April 24–25, 2025

For too long, energy studies have tended to focus on familiar fuels considered in isolation, especially oil and coal. This conference instead seeks to explore new “metabolic” approaches that trace diverse flows of energy, their combinations, and their transformative dynamics, materialized in spatial infrastructures, built environments, and institutions, throughout economy and society. In this holistic understanding, the concept of energy can extend across the whole web of life, from hydroelectric reservoirs and fodder grass to chicken protein, tailing ponds, and nuclear waste. It encompasses the vital sociometabolic processes that mediate, flow, and result from diverse sites of capitalist development and biogeophysical transformation, ranging from the domestic household and the metropolitan region to the factory farm and the financial terminal, as well as the waste dump and, indeed, the planetary biosphere as a whole.

Such a perspective opens up urgent new questions for scholars working across the environmental social sciences and humanities. How have the dynamics of capital–across time and space–shaped and been shaped by (geo)political strategies to harness, store, distribute, and deploy diverse forms, combinations, and assemblages of energy (including fossil fuels)? How have historical and contemporary forms of empire, military power, and territorial governance mediated the energetics of capitalist development across diverse spheres of life, from extraction, production, and transportation to social reproduction and waste management? How have changing infrastructures for appropriating, processing, transporting, and deploying energy in turn shaped historical structures of power, profit, and ideology? Which downstream sectors, from agriculture to aluminum and fertilizer production, deserve attention as major energy consumers, and thus as drivers of historical and ongoing forms of socioenvironmental destruction and crisis? How might such holistic understandings of energy metabolism inform our understanding of contemporary strategies and struggles to restructure inherited fossil fuel-fired, carbon-intensive forms of social life?

In this conference, established and early-career scholars working on such questions in the environmental social sciences and humanities gather to share their insights and discuss emerging research agendas with the CEGU community.