Center for International and Regional Studies

The FIFA World Cup: Football, Citizenship, and National Identity 1930-2022
2021-03-21 18:00 - 19:30 (Europe/Moscow)
Gijsbert Oonk, Director of the Sport and Nation research program at Erasmus University Rotterdam, discussed his study exploring the relationship between national belonging, acquiring citizenship, and migration. Taking high profile examples from international sports events, he sought to unveil the complexities behind the question: who may represent the nation? The historical models of jus sanguine (blood ties) and jus soli (territorial birthright) are well-known markers and symbols of citizenship and nationality. Oonk proposed an ideal-type model of thick, thin, and in-between forms of citizenship.

Speaker: Gijsbert Oonk holds the endowed Jean Monnet chair on Europe in Globalizing World: Migration, Citizenship and Identity. This chair promotes education and research in the field of Global history, European studies, and national identity. The Jean Monnet chairs are an initiative of the European Commission to promote education, research, and reflection in the field of European integration studies at higher education institutions. The Sport and Nation research program at Erasmus University Rotterdam focuses on talented athletes with a migrant background within football and the Olympic Games in the context of changing citizenship, multiple citizenship, and elite migration.

Moderator: Danyel Reiche, Visiting Associate Professor at GUQ.

The Gospel of Work and Money: Global Histories of Industrial Education Virtual Working Group
2021-03-22 17:00 - 19:30 (Europe/Moscow)
On March 22, 2021, the Center for International and Regional Studies (CIRS) held a virtual working group under a faculty-led research initiative on The Gospel of Work and Money: Global Histories of Industrial Education. This book project is being led by Georgetown University-Qatar’s Professor Karine Walther and Professor Oliver Charbonneau from the University of Glasgow. Over the course of the two-hour meeting, fourteen scholars participating in this project presented their preliminary chapter abstracts. The assembled group of scholars through their various chapter contributions will be exploring industrial education in different global contexts, from multi-disciplinary perspectives, including both historical and contemporary case studies.

Laura Mair’s chapter will be focusing on the ragged schools’ movement in Britain in the mid 19th century that were an Evangelical response to address child poverty. These schools provided impoverished children with a free education delivered by volunteer teachers, and by 1868 there were approximately 560 ragged schools teaching 50,000 children. In the earliest years of the movement, literature suggests that the focus was on providing children with the “three Rs” i.e. reading, writing, and arithmetic. But increasingly industrial schooling became a core component of the education offerings at these institutions. Dr. Mair’s chapter will trace the shift towards industrial building that occurred in these ragged movement schools from the 1840s asking whether this shift was financially or ideologically driven. Dr. Mair will also be studying the linkages between industrial education and the emergence of the ragged school emigration scheme, to shed light on broader social and economic attitudes towards poor children.

Janne Lahti’s chapter will focus on industrial education in native American boarding schools, and how materiality entangled with ideas of labor in the late-1800s and early-1900s, propagating and complicating the racial and cultural moorings of the empire. Using examples from the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania, Dr. Lahti will explore how these institutions contested white and indigenous cultures of work, and became a tool for transforming indigenous students into loyal subjects of the US settler state by transforming them into white workers who embodied white material cultures.

Helge Wendt’s chapter will focus on the industrial education system in Spanish America, where specialized training programs were established to educate young men in mechanical production processes. The model of training young boys and men was largely similar to other technical and industrial school systems established in other countries in the 19th century. However, a key element that made it different from the European or American contexts was how it was integrated into agricultural production. Dr. Wendt will study the establishment of specialized educational institutions from different countries of Spanish America, highlighting the connections with the political, economic, and educational contexts of these schools.

Elif Akşit’s chapter will focus on the history of industrial schools in the Ottoman Empire and their subsequent continuation in modern Turkey. Dr. Akşit analysis of industrial education in the late Ottoman empire and modern Turkey suggests that they are part and parcel of efforts resisting colonialism, modernization, and the transformation from an empire to the republic. The first group of industrial schools were very similar to the ragged schools movement in Britain, focusing on the education of orphans and involving them in the production of goods for the army. Dr. Aksit aims to study the development of the Girls Industrial Schools in the late Ottoman Empire and Girls’ Institutes in Turkey and explore the question of what is meant by “Industrial” in the western as well as eastern contexts.

The technical petro-education program at the College of North Atlantic in Qatar is the focus of Danya Al-Saleh’s chapter. She will examine struggles over transferring the national oil industry’s in-house industrial trades education program to a Canadian branch campus in Qatar. The program in question aims to produce enough Qatari men graduates to work as entry level technicians in the industry. However due to racialized labor hierarchies in the Gulf, it has been a challenge to recruit and retain Qatari students. The situation is further made complex by Qatar’s broader development agenda, which emphasizes building an educational system for a knowledge-based post-oil international order. Al-Saleh aims to situate this research within the longer history of capitalism and imperialism shaping oil education programs and racialized labor hierarchies across the Gulf.

Zahra Babar’s chapter will examine the development and delivery of technical training programs and vocational education in Pakistan over the past three decades. Technical and vocational education have a long history in Pakistan, and justified on the basis of bridging the gap between the educated and the uneducated poor in the country. Designed to be delivered to the lower income, rural, and marginalized communities, vocational training delivery was increasingly supported by the large rural support programs during the 1980s-1990s. At that period delivering employable skills for lower income communities was tied to the needs of the local labor market. However, in the 2000s there was a shift in the logic and the design of these programs, as increasingly government efforts in support of vocational training became specifically tied to migration opportunities for unemployed, lower income citizens. In this chapter Babar will aim to explore ways in which the social and physical mobility of the poor has always played a central role in shaping Pakistan’s vocational education goals.

Bronwen Everill’s chapter will focus on the role of Liberians in promoting projects of industrial schooling in Liberia and around West Africa. Black Americans who migrated to Liberia in the nineteenth century helped to establish various educational enterprises aimed at promoting Christian education and agricultural and industrial education amongst different African communities. By the close of the 19th century Liberians were involved in a variety of imperial projects training African workers in other parts of the continent for plantation labor, domestic housework, and for skilled and unskilled industrial labor. She aims to look at ways educational expertise was used to both reinforce and challenge racial hierarchy in the African context. Dr. Everill’s analysis of these programs situates them within transnational imperial collaborations facilitating colonial capitalism’s reach in Africa.

Continuing the theme of African American education, Julia Bates, stated that American sociologists played an eminent role in supporting and promoting the industrial education model used at the Tuskegee and Hampton institutes. While sociologist such as Thomas Jesse Jones, received recognition for their advocacy of this model, W.E.B. Du Bois’s critique of the model was largely ignored in American sociology. Dr. Bates in her chapter will examine this critique of American sociology of race, and highlight how the American sociology of race has been intertwined with and supports this model.

Hossein Ayazi’s chapter also draws on the Liberian case, and how the Booker Washington Institute and its core constituencies were able to merge the promise of Black self-government with the prolongation of plantation production under the control of American multinational corporations. Specifically, in his chapter, Dr. Ayazi looks to Booker Washington Institute materials, U.S.-Liberian correspondence regarding the institute and the Firestone rubber plantation, and social scientific reports that discussed the role of industrial education across Africa. Across these archives, Dr. Ayazi traces the broader recognition of Liberia’s latent capacity for political and economic self-rule, as well as the recasting of Liberian self-rule as a condition of techno-scientific advancement in the realm of agricultural production. In other words, with enough techno-scientific training, it is (Americo-)Liberians would replace the white Americans that ran the vast colonial bureaucracies of multinational plantation corporations, and in doing so, manage their own country, the world’s second Black Republic. Dr. Ayazi proposes that the Booker Washington Institute and broader shifts in international finance, plantation production, and industrial education not only deflected the charge of “colonial slavery” levied against the Firestone in the 1920s and 1930s. By the beginning of the Cold War, the Booker Washington Institute had also modeled the United States’ counterrevolutionary approach to agricultural and rural development across Africa.

Arun Kumar’s chapter focuses on colonial India and Christian missionary schools that promoted and provided industrial education. These missionary schools engineered the concept of work in colonial India, by teaching that work is not just labor and economic activity but also an ethical and religious activity. Industrial schools were the key institutions through which this discourse of manual labor and work was articulated and practiced. Dr. Kumar chose two school in South India, which were run by the American Madura Mission, the American Arcot Mission, and the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, as case studies, to address the role of Christian missionaries in building a new discourse of work, worker and labor by studying the history of their industrial schools.

Sarah Steinbock-Pratt’s chapter will study the United States’ efforts at developing industrial education in the Philippines as part of its colonial governance. While the colonial educational officials looked to American schools for black and Indian students as possible models, industrial education was not the initial focus of the schools in the Philippines. The early years of colonial schooling in the islands centered on English language instruction and primary subjects, while a wide-ranging debate was held over the type of education that ought to be provided. At the same time, officials in the US and the Philippines instituted a program to send Filipino students to the United States to study. This program also faced similar questions about whether to provide government scholars with classical or industrial training. Ultimately, like the colonial educational system itself, the program was divided between an attempt to win over and Americanize elite Filipinos, and the perceived imperative to train Filipinos for futures rooted in agricultural development.

In his chapter Dolf-Alexander Neuhaus will study the role of industrial education before and during the colonial period in Korea (1910-1945), with a particular focus on the development of YMCA. The first “Industrial Education Departments” were developed by YMCA and other missionaries in Korea, to educate the students about industrial labor and capitalism. The missionaries used these departments as a convenient tool for instilling Koreans with a Protestant work ethic, whereas for the Koreans these were a means to attain civilization and enlightenment. The Japanese Governor-General also supported similar programs to provide industrial education to the Koreans. Neuhaus proposes to explore the intersection between the missionary efforts for industrial education and colonial education policy in Korea.

Lukas Allemann’s chapter will study industrial education under the Soviet Arctic sphere, and on the industrial education programs the USSR provided to the Arctic’s indigenous communities, namely the Saami people. This chapter will aim to highlight the connection between monoculture and economy, as well as monoculture and dedication. The economy in the north, mostly focused on reindeer hurting. Which meant that industrial schooling, built around a monoculture of education, went hand in hand with industrial reindeer herding. Monoculture in school also meant focusing on linguistic monoculture and the majority culture, meaning here the Russian culture. He expressed that this a has significance across regions, because all circumpolar states did similar things in this respect, and in this respect, there is no Iron Curtain. These industrial schools also highlight the ‘Westernness’ of the Soviet Union, which Dr. Allemann proposes to address.

The discussion was brought to a close by Joshua Frank Cárdenas, whose proposed chapter will focus on the origin and founding of D-Q University in his presentation. He explained that D-Q University is a California-based Chicano and Indian college, founded in response to religious and federal industrial education policies and practices for captive Nations and individuals. For his research he proposes to detail the early origins of industrial education for Americans found at Hampton, Carlisle, Perris Indian, Sherman Indian, Fort Bidwell and Greenville Indian Industrial Institutes or boarding schools. Cárdenas also aims to examine the nature of California Indian and American Indian communities in 1960s and trace the early struggles of Red Power.

The authors received feedback on their abstracts, and engaged in a group discussion on the broader thematic framework for this book project, and discussed how the various chapters are to speak to each other. Between May and August, short follow-up virtual meetings will be held where draft papers will be presented and discussed by the group.

For the roundtable agenda, click here.For the participants’ biographies, click here.For the research initiative, click here.

Participants and Discussants:

Elif Ekin Akşit, Ankara University, TurkeyMaram Al-Qershi, CIRS – Georgetown University in QatarDanya Al-Saleh, University of Wisconsin–MadisonLukas Allemann, University of LaplandHossein Ayazi, Williams CollegeZahra Babar, CIRS – Georgetown University in QatarJulia Bates, Sacred Heart UniversityMisba Bhatti, CIRS – Georgetown University in QatarJoshua Frank Cárdenas, California Indian Nations CollegeOliver Charbonneau, University of Glasgow Ahmad Dallal, Georgetown University in QatarBronwen Everill, University of CambridgeArun Kumar, University of NottinghamJanne Laht, University of HelsinkiLaura Mair, University of EdinburghSuzi Mirgani, CIRS – Georgetown University in QatarDolf-Alexander Neuhaus, Free Berlin University Sarah Steinbock-Pratt, University of AlabamaKarine Walther, Georgetown University in QatarElizabeth Wanucha, CIRS – Georgetown University in QatarHelge Wendt, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (MPIWG) Berlin

Article by Misba Bhatti, Research Analyst at CIRS

CIRS Faculty Fellow Talk: The Amazingly Idiosyncratic History of Passports by Edward Kolla
2021-03-29 18:00 - 19:30 (Europe/Moscow)
When COVID19 hit, many inveterate travelers like myself were dazed by how quickly something we took for granted had disappeared. Gone, suddenly, was our ability to grab our passport, hop on a plane, and be in a new country—sometimes even without the hassle of getting a visa. But something else we took for granted, back in those halcyon days, was the very need for passports to enjoy international mobility. Though ubiquitous and seemingly all-necessary, passports are something of a historical fluke. While travel documents of all sorts date back to the start of recorded history, the story of how we arrived at these little booklets—which, by the way, are totally uncodified in international law—is quirky, complex, and counter-intuitive.

Edward Kolla | The Amazingly Idiosyncratic History of Passports | March 29, 2021

Extra Q&A | The Amazingly Idiosyncratic History of Passports | April 2021

Speaker: Eddie Kolla has taught history for 10 years at Georgetown University in Qatar. He has also held research fellowships, most recently, at the Institute for Historical Studies at the University of Texas at Austin and the Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law in Heidelberg, Germany. His work sits at the intersection of history, international relations, and law and includes Sovereignty, International Law, and the French Revolution (Cambridge, 2017).

Everyday Energy: Approaches to Lived Experience
2021-04-07 20:00 - 21:30 (Europe/Moscow)
The Center for International and Regional Studies (CIRS) at Georgetown University in Qatar launched its newly-formed Energy Humanities research initiative with this webinar panel discussion titled “Everyday Energy: Approaches to Lived Experience.” The event featured three area experts in the field of Energy Humanities and was moderated by GU-Q faculty members, Victoria Googasian, Trish Kahle, and Firat Oruc. The Energy Humanities initiative is a new project under the CIRS Environmental Studies thematic cluster and aims to provide new understandings of the influence and impacts of energy in everyday lives and stimulate new conversations in the scholarship.

Speakers:

Dominic Boyer, Founding Director of the Center for Energy and Environmental Research in the Human Sciences, Rice University.

Sara B. Pritchard, Associate Professor in the Department of Science & Technology Studies at Cornell University.

Jennifer Wenzel, Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature and of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies at Columbia University.

Moderators:

Victoria Googasian, Assistant Professor at Georgetown University- Qatar.

Trish Kahle, Assistant Professor at Georgetown University- Qatar.

Firat Oruc, Assistant Professor at Georgetown University- Qatar.

Transcript

click here to read

Good evening and welcome to the CIRS panel discussion entitled “Everyday Energy: Approaches Delivered Experience.” My name is Ahmad Dallal, I’m the Dean of the Georgetown University Doha campus. This panel discussion is part of the CIRS, the Center for International and Regional Studies, newly formed research initiative on Energy Humanities, which is being led by three Georgetown University faculty members, professors, Victoria Googasian, assistant professor of American Literature at GUQ. Professor Trish Kahle, assistant professor of history at Georgetown University Qatar, and Professor Firat Oruc, assistant professor of world literature at Georgetown. Building on the previous research and scholarly record of CIRS, the thematic focus on environmental studies continues to address central questions related to climate change and other issues of environmental concern. Today’s Energy Humanities Initiative is a new project under the CIRS Environmental Studies’ thematic cluster that aims to generate new scholarly conversations on the importance of everyday energetic life to the study of energy’s past, present, and future. For today’s discussion, we are honored to have three scholars renowned for their work in the field of energy humanities. Professor Dominic Boyer, professor of anthropology and founding director of the Center for Energy and Environmental Research in the Human Science at Rice University. Professor Sara Pritchard, associate professor in the Department of Science and Technology Studies at Cornell University. And Professor Jennifer Wenzel, Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature and of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies at Columbia University. I graduated from that department. Just one little remark I was asked to mention that at the bottom of the screen, at the very right, that is an icon, which says CC, which will enable you to have a live transcript if you need to. So you could click on that icon to have a transcription of the lecture. Right now, without further ado, there is a very rich conversation ahead of us. I will hand over to Vicky to start the show, and welcome.

Hi, everyone, and welcome once again on behalf of myself and my co-organizers, Trish and Firat to this kickoff webinar for CIRS’s New Energy Humanities research initiative. I’m also just going to speak very briefly so we can get the show on the road and hand things over to our distinguished panelists. But I did want to just say a few words about the project. Very, very briefly before we get started. So we’ve conceived of this project as the title of the panel and the webinar suggests in response to what we perceived as a need to consider the lived experience of energy. And I want to explain what we mean by that phrase. Though, of course, we’re hoping that our panelists can help us think through it in greater depth as well. So here in the Gulf, I think it’s not surprising that scholarly approaches to energy have often been concerned with the sort of big picture issues of state security, political stability, global economic relations, that arise out of the production and consumption of energy. And this is really the zoomed-out view of energy, as it were. But our goal for this project is to use our position as humanists, as humanities scholars, to add just another layer of nuance and texture to that study of energy by bringing the scale of everyday life, everyday life of individuals and communities into focus. Which is not to say that we’re trying to reject or ignore the other scales at which states or economic systems and energy infrastructure operate. But we hope to connect these big structures that govern the flow of energy in our world to everyday experiences of ordinary people both in this region and beyond it. As you may know, the energy humanities is a rapidly expanding field of research, and we think that humanistic approaches are particularly well suited to answering these kinds of questions about the social and cultural dimensions of energy. We expect this panel to be the first in a series of conversations, so we’re inviting everyone here to keep an eye on the lovely new website that our colleagues at CIRS have put together for us, where you’ll find podcast episodes and other content forthcoming as the project continues to get to gather momentum. But tonight, we’re very pleased to be hosting this trio of experts whose work covers a wide range of fields, topics, geographical regions, all of whom have already made vital contributions to the study of lived experience of energy. And we’re excited to think with them about this topic tonight. So without further ado, I will hand things over to our first panelist, Dominic Boyer. Dr. Boyer, take it away, whenever you’re ready.

Thanks so much, Vicky. And thanks to all the organizers of this event. I think it’s really quite historically important, this initiative that you are that you’re developing. And I just feel humbled and honored to be a part of it. Thank you so much. So my background is in anthropology and especially in historical and political anthropology. And so, part of thinking about everyday energy for me is thinking about how we came to the kind of relationship to energy we have today, which, according to fellow historical anthropologist David Hughes, is one of energy without conscience. We use incredible amounts of energy, especially in the Global North, often without thinking very much about its consequences. So what I’d like to reconstruct in my few minutes here is a very brief glimpse of that bigger history. You see an image here which shows a kind of macrocosmic visualization of the United States energy system. Two things could strike you. One, how huge it is, 100 quadrillion BTUs worth of energy in one year flowing to the United States. And 80 percent of that is still fossil fuels. Only one percent is solar. So, you know, if we had started listening to scientists some 30 years ago, maybe that would be inverted. But the fact that it hasn’t suggests that these historical legacies are very important in terms of setting conditions of possibility for contemporary everyday energy experiences. And so that’s what I like to sort of highlight a little bit today. Now, I think that the history of modern energy, maybe counterintuitively actually begins in the European colonies, in the so-called new world, and particularly in the sugar and coffee plantations. This has been documented through a substantial amount of historical and political anthropology, that have looked at these relationships that, you know, the colonists came to the new world with the ambition to start growing things. And this precious commodity of sugar was one of their first ambitions. Columbus carried sugar cane clippings with him on his very first…his second voyage, rather. And as the conditions proved ecologically ripe for this kind of development in the 16th and 17th century, first the Portuguese and then the British and French created thousands of plantations across the Caribbean with the aim of exporting these precious commodities back to Europe. African slaves were brought in by the millions to power to offer the labor power for these plantations. And they were treated, as David Hughes argues, as a kind of fuel, as an expendable resource. They were literally worked to death in this process. And so for him, our relationship to energy today sort of begins in that lack of concern with human welfare in the plantation system, and with the fact that, as Kathryn Yusoff has put it, Europeans learned how to treat human beings as expendable and extractable energy properties through this experience. Now, sugar itself had a dramatic influence back in Europe. It transformed both middle-class and working-class diets. It helped create the industrial worker who could work longer, faster, harder than before, whose diet might still be poor. But having these stimulants always at the ready really helped. And indeed, to this day, we see the kind of emphasis on stimulants and labor connected to sort of capitalist modernity. So this changed over time, of course, but it changed in part because of the restriction of the slave trade. The abolition movements definitely deserve credit. But above all, it was the uprisings of slaves against the plantation system that were decisive. And in this respect, the Haitian revolution really deserves our attention as a geopolitical event that, in the specific sense, brought to an end France’s new world ambitions, led to the Louisiana Purchase, and the doubling in size of the United States, but also led to an increasing concern among those who operated plantations about what to do with this unruly labor force, and an interest in investing in machine labor as a way of replacing it. So, a lot of the innovations and machine labor that we credit as being associated with the industrial revolution begin to take shape within the plantation system first. Then those ideas come back to Europe. And there’s a wonderful book, a wonderful work of energy humanities by Cara Daggett called “The Birth of Energy,” that explains how in Victorian Britain you get a coming together of steam engine technology, imperial ambitions, new thermodynamic science and Presbyterian moral values that helped to redefine energy, which, up until then had been sort of a sense of dynamic virtue. It gets redefined and specified as being associated with work. Energy as work. And it’s work within a universe that seemed to be prone always to tending towards entropy, towards dissipation, towards waste. So human beings have to organize themselves to work even harder to make something of what the divine has bequeathed them. That leads, of course, to a tremendous investment in civilizational hierarchies and definitions that the Victorians are famous for. All arranged by capacities to use machines and to produce work and energetic racism, as Dagget describes it, that legitimates further imperial expansion and dispossession and that naturalizes fossil fuel use and wage labor as social necessities for human improvement, reinforcing the capitalist obsessions with work and growth. But of course, all of this is known already in the Caribbean. It doesn’t get invented in England. It really gets worked out in the new world. If you look at the old plantation manuals, you see how they already were conceiving of human beings as machines, of plantations, as machines, where they had to manage energy and productivity in very careful ways. Well, to bring this story a little bit closer out of the “sucro-political” into what I call the “carbo-political” era, with the spread of machines throughout Europe, comes an increasing need for the energy density of high carbon fuels. Wood will no longer do, and coal, by the end of the 19th century, becomes the dominant enabling fuel behind a European imperial modernity. And along with it, comes a sort of new regime of production and a new regime of commodities and consumption; what some have called the democracy of things, that suddenly, the “thingly” life around us becomes enriched and people demand and feel entitled to goods that they wouldn’t have had before this era. So the carbo-politics has a kind of dramatic shaping of what we think of as modern life and the affordance and luxuries that it involves. But as Timothy Mitchell tells the tale in his fabulous book, “Carbon Democracy,” there were limits to the sort of evolution of coal. And it really wasn’t about the pollution, which, we all know that burning coal is polluting and unpleasant, but it was less about that dimension of coal use that was problematic than the political, the labor politics of it. It takes a lot of people to mine coal and move it around. And those people have to go underground in dangerous conditions. And they become, they develop a sense of fraternity and identity and they start making demands, demands that we now call maybe, perhaps “social democratic” demands for labor rights and safe labor conditions. And, in fact, a lot of the the labor improvements that occur in the 20th century are owed, according to Mitchell, to the work of coal miners specifically. So he argues that in the post-World War Two redesign of the global economy, there’s a deliberate shift from coal to petroleum. Petroleum requires much less labor. It’s quite flexible in terms of how can be moved around the oceans via shipping and pipelines. And also it has these material properties that petrochemicals can produce plastics. A whole new regime of consumer goods becomes possible. And so the global modernity that typifies where we are now really takes shape in the middle of the 20th century, driven by petro-culture, driven by consumerism and again, cheap goods and rampant energy use without much regard for environmental and social consequences. So, it really just brings us to where we are today. And this is my last slide, hopefully on time, where, you know, the question that all of us are interested in is: what comes post-petro and how will that intersect? Given our topic here today with our everyday expectations, uses, ideologies, understandings of energy. Can we shift away from this model of energy as work? Do we have to shift towards something that Daggett calls “energy as freedom,” liberating energy from work? Do we have to shift our energy sources from the heavy reliance on petroleum and other high-density sources towards solarity? Which is something that a lot of people are talking about. How can that be achieved? What are the cultural forms that will come along with a solar revolution? These are things that I think we’re going to talk about in the discussion to come, so I’ll just stop there. Thank you.

Thanks so much for that history, as you kick us off, and for those questions. And I do think we will come back to you. I just want to remind our attendees that you can post questions at anytime, using Q&A button at the bottom of the screen. And we will have time to get to those questions at the end of tonight’s webinar. So now I will go ahead and hand things off to our second panelist, Sara Pritchard. So, Dr. Pritchard, the floor is yours.

Yes, I think I know how to do this after all this time with Zoom, sorry. This was working a minute ago. Hopefully this is working now. OK. Can you see this? Is this working now? Great. Thank you. So I’m delighted to be here and thank you for the invitation and honor of being part of this launching event. It is an exciting and important initiative. Very briefly, as some of you know, my areas of interest include environmental history, the history of technology, and environmental science studies. So, most broadly, I’m interested in the relationships between, and dynamics among, people, the environment, and technology in the past, but also with an eye to the present and the future. First off, as a historian, I very much appreciate the roundtable’s and thematic project’s interest in everyday energy and lived experience for a number of reasons influenced by social history, labor history, and other subfields. These themes encourage us to think about energy not just from elite perspectives, political, economic, and intellectual elites, but they push us to consider a much wider range of historical and also contemporary actors. This is sometimes called a bottom-up history versus top-down history. These themes also call attention to race, ethnicity, class, gender, religion, and other categories and historical processes such as colonialism, which all can shape experiences with, and ideas about, energy. If we put these very broad concerns in conversation with energy specifically, I think we can consider the experiences and voices of energy workers, users, consumers, mediators, as well as of non-users, those who opt out, but particularly those who are outside dominant energy systems or made outside these systems. Overall, everyday energy and lived experience encourages us to engage with a much wider set of actors, consider the role of agency of these groups. They nuance our understanding beyond simplistic generalizations, and they open up conversations and windows onto contestation and debate. All are really important. Now, as I was reviewing the prompt and trying to collect my thoughts and comments, I have to admit that I kept finding myself sliding back into energy systems and infrastructures and regimes, which in many ways is the opposite of this initiative. So my comments here, and I think there’s synergies with Dominic’s presentation, focus on the intersections of these issues. I want to think a little bit about how energy systems or these higher-level analyses certainly shape and limit, quote-unquote, everyday energy without being either deterministic or outside historical change. But at the same time, how a more social history approach to energy infrastructure and regimes yield important insights about the limits and constraints of these systems. So I want to make five brief points. When we think about technological systems, especially so-called high-tech systems, I think it’s really easy to focus on the technological stuff because systems are by definition large scale and are composed of many constituent parts. So if we think about nuclear reactors to produce energy, we might think about uranium fuel rods, cooling towers, power lines, and so forth. But as historians of technology and others have shown, large-scale systems also depend on workers, not just experts, designers, and engineers, but operators, technicians, and other everyday workers. Often these workers become more visible, or quite visible, during crises, such as the operators who desperately tried to manage the reactors at Fukushima in the hopes of preventing meltdown, which didn’t happen. Or in February of this year, an unusually cold winter storm settled across Texas and much of the American South, and utility operators initially initiated what were intended to be rolling blackouts to prevent a catastrophic failure of the grid. Workers also contend with crises and emergencies and their complex aftermaths, often at considerable risks to themselves. So here we might think of Fukushima’s eighteen thousand cleanup workers. The large point I want to make here is that workers are really essential to high-tech energy systems and, therefore, consumers’ ability to use energy. Workers have particular lived experiences with energy and energy systems as laborers, and consumers and users ultimately rely on energy workers’ knowledge, skill, and labor. The second point I want to make is that, in some parts of the world—and I think we have to be careful about generalizations— energy systems are certain forms of energy and their associate systems have become so, so normal and systematized that they basically become invisible or taken for granted. Electricity is a good example here, say, in Europe and North America. Several scholars have analyzed how energy production and consumption is increasingly separated both spatially and socially. So many of us are fortunate to just be able to flip a switch to turn on electric lights rather than spending days and weeks making candles for winter. But as scholars of infrastructure have argued, infrastructure becomes so normalized, it becomes an invisible, assumed backdrop—until it fails. So the point I want to highlight here is that normal accidents—to borrow the phrase from Perrow—disasters really, so-called disasters, and failure, put everyday dependency on energy and energy systems into sharper relief. However, scholars have also shown how it takes concerted work and effort to normalize and institutionalize energy systems. For instance, Chris Jones has discussed how people had to be taught how to use and burn anthracite coal in the domestic sphere. It wasn’t self-evident. And he has these wonderful multipage manuals teaching servants for wealthy East Coast families basically how you put anthracite coal in stoves. I love this example for a couple of reasons. For one, that it highlights domestic workers and their labor generally, but particularly their labor around energy specifically. Yet another example, electrification was much slower and funkier than confident proclamations by inventors, utilities, and promoters at the time suggest. So we need to look at rhetoric versus reality. And what I want to highlight here is how energy systems and infrastructure are neither inevitable nor permanent. They take work. In my view, one of the most important issues is the uneven or unequal distribution of social and environmental costs, risks, and vulnerabilities associated with energy infrastructure and regimes, both during normal operations and crises. For many marginalized groups, this is a defining feature of energy as lived experience. So to give two examples from colleagues: Andrew Needham has shown how dramatic demographic growth and suburbanization in the US Southwest, where it’s very hot, depended on a lot of energy in part to support centralized air conditioning. Yet the so-called livability of these suburbs relied on coal-fueled electricity. Electricity produced on Diné or Navajo lands And it was these communities who experienced the disproportionate environmental and health effects of coal-fired plants. Or we could look at an example from atomic energy workers, Gabrielle Hecht, who’s looked at uranium mining in Africa and the short-term and long-term hazards nuclear workers faced through exposure, even though they weren’t seen as part of the nuclear age or nuclear world, that at times, this extended into families and communities with radioactive clothing or using scrap metal from mines to make shacks or other buildings. So my take-off point here is I think, frankly, it’s irresponsible to analyze energy systems and energy without attending to social and environmental justice. Quickly, my fifth point: energy systems are obviously dependent on organic and or inorganic energy sources, but these systems are always located in environmental contexts that both shape and are shaped by those systems. And this is encapsulated by the concept of an “envirotech” subfield in the history of technology and environmental history. And we can certainly hear considerable lived experiences of both humans and non-humans in these energy landscapes. Certainly, hydroelectricity is probably one of the most obvious cases here. So I’d like to highlight that this complete separation of environment and technology is an erroneous and even dangerous ideal. So to quickly close as we are now in year two of the pandemic, I want to acknowledge the vital energy of human labor, particularly essential workers and caregivers in these extraordinary times, but also, as Gabrielle Hecht calls it, extraordinary times that have revealed and deepened existing problems and inequalities both nationally and globally. And I look forward to our conversation.

Thanks so much for those remarks and those points that we’ll bear in mind moving forward tonight. So finally, I’d like to hand things over to Jennifer Wenzel, who will close out our panelists’ opening remarks. So, Dr. Wenzel, take it away.

Thank you very much. And I’d like to add my thanks to the organizers. It’s such an honor to participate in this inaugural event. And I’m particularly enthusiastic about the specific focus you’ve chosen for your energy humanities initiative: the theme of everyday energy. To me, the central idea of the energy humanities is that neither climate change nor the various economic and environmental challenges associated with fossil fuels are merely engineering problems. Rather, are political problems, narrative problems, and ultimately problems of the imagination. My own expertise is in narrative, not just literary narratives, but also the implicit unspoken narratives that shape cultural imagining and everyday experience and how we think about, or more importantly, don’t think about, issues like oil and fossil fuels. This is the idea of normalization that Sarah was just talking about. For many people who are fortunate enough to inhabit what the Niger Delta poet Ogaga Ifowodo calls the “chain or ease” enabled by fossil fuels, the primary mode of thinking about energy is not having to think about it. In this fossil-fueled cultural imaginary, oil is at once everywhere and nowhere. Indispensible, yet largely on apprehended, not so much invisible, as unseen. And I borrow this line from my introduction to “Fueling Culture.” I’m bringing my screen up now. My introduction to this book, Fueling Culture, which is a compendium of keywords on the intersections between energy and culture that I coedited with Imre Szeman and Patricia Yaeger, and Dominic has a piece in this collection. One of the key concepts in Energy Humanities is “impasse,” the predicament that Imre Szeman has described as knowing where we stand with regard to environment and energy, but being unable to take action at a scale adequate to the situation. Impasse is a problem for politics. But I’d argue that it’s also connected to esthetics, by which I mean ways of seeing and sensing how we learn to see or not to see. How we learn to regard some things as ugly and other things as beautiful. Think wind turbines. The future might hinge on whether we can convince people that wind turbines are beautiful, solar panels as well. How we learn to regard some things as pleasurable or desirable. These questions of pleasure and desire are central to the question of everyday energy. No matter what we think about oil, every one of us derives some kind of pleasure from the world that fossil fuels have built, including the ways that our own bodies interact with and are shaped by the world around us. It’s not that we love oil itself, which is, after all, kind of smelly and sticky, but that we all have some embodied attachment to the things that oil makes possible. I hear air conditioning is pretty important to a number of the hosts of this event. So for some people, this sense of embodied petro-pleasure comes from the smoothness and sheen of plastic. For me, the smell of my dad’s butane lighter, when I was a kid. I’ve even written an essay on how I love to fly. I think I remember it vaguely, how I love to fly. Of course, it’s not the indignities of post 9/11 commercial air travel that I love, but rather the thrill of exhilaration when the pilot hits the gas and my body is jolted back in the seat. I love the technological sublime of an active airfield, the many kinds of labor that bring a plane from the sky to the gate, and the sea of twinkling blue lights on an airport runway at night. I first described my love of flying for the students in my class on literature and oil. I asked the students to write what I call an “oil inventory,” a creative, open-ended assignment in which they make an inventory. In other words, a list or an accounting of the significance and presence of oil in their lives. Some describe their relationship to oil over the course of a single day. Some wrote a biography of their oil lives so far. I came up with the idea of the oil inventory, when I read this passage from Edward Said’s introduction to Orientalism, where he writes: “The starting point of critical elaboration is the consciousness of what one really is, and is ‘knowing thyself’ as a product of the historical process to date, which is deposited in you an infinity of traces, without leaving an inventory… Therefore it is imperative at the outset to compile such an inventory.” And I love the kind of sedimentary imagery of history depositing these traces in you. So the fundamental gesture of the oil inventory is this active process of knowing oneself in relationship to fossil fuels. Here’s my own academic biography in the form of an oil inventory. So the oil inventory challenges students— and I should say that I wrote this academic bio on a dare from Stephanie LeMenager, another wonderful scholar of energy humanities. So the oil inventory challenges students to acknowledge their love for some part of the world that oil has made—something they would not want to lose. Rather than focusing only on guilt, shame, or fear, which don’t seem a promising way to break through impasse and to lean toward transition. Such negative emotions can lead to a gesture that’s all too easy of pointing out energy hypocracy, whether one’s own or others. As if anyone who drives or flies or eats food comes from a factory gives up the right to wonder and worry about fossil fuels. We are oil subjects who inhabit a society built upon fossil fuels. That’s the big picture the oil inventory invites students to glimpse. But one of the less encouraging lessons that I take from the historical work of scholars like Matt Huber is that the oil inventory was actually invented by the oil industry. And here’s one example of Huber’s argument about advertising campaigns launched by U.S. oil companies dating back to the 1940s that explicitly invite consumers to consider the indispensability of petroleum products in their lives. So I think here we see some of the ideological and imaginary work of normalization. Look, there’s oil in your food. Isn’t that great? Don’t worry about it. And I would say that the same strategy is at work in this recent ad campaign by Exxon Mobil, which is called Energy Lives Here. And I’m going to play an ad from this campaign, which is fortuitously enough called Enabling Everyday Progress. And I’ve Lost. Here it goes. I’m going to go ahead. I’m not totally sure the audio is going to come through. You don’t need to think about the energy that makes our lives possible. Because we do. We’re Exxon Mobile and powering the world responsibly is our job. Because boiling an egg isn’t as simple as just boiling an egg. Life takes energy. Energy and lives here. So ad this offers a perfect example of Huber’s argument that the energy industry in North America creates knowledge and awareness of consumers’ dependence on energy precisely in order to ensure passivity. Right. It’s not that they don’t want us to know about energy. They want us to know that we need it. So notice how the ad invites viewers to forget the revelations offered by the ad’s visual mapping of all that is involved in boiling an egg. So we hear “you don’t need to think about the energy that makes our lives possible because we do.” So the lesson that I draw here is that critical studies of energy in the Energy Humanities must reclaim the oil inventory from the oil industry in order to disrupt the settled habits of mind that surround the energy regimes of the present. Thus, the need for oil inventories of a more complete and complex kind than those that Exxon Mobil are offering. But this task is made harder by the fact that capitalism understands the workings of desire and the imagination better than we would like. Thus, the need for critical investigations of everyday energy. Thank you.

Thank you so much to all of our speakers for those really wonderful opening remarks. Now we’re going to move into a section that will offer some questions and hopefully get a discussion going. Among them, please do feel free to respond directly to each other as well as to the questions. And I’m also going to try and incorporate some of your remarks into the questions as we go. And so the first is to really think about method by trying to and — I’m sorry that my cat just decided that this was the time she was going to come and try and bother me. So we’ll see if she cuts off. But in any case, how your discipline, in particular, understands the concept of lived experience, because I was really struck in your talks by some of the different ideas that came through, the ideas about social revolution, about work, about sensory life. And so I’m just going to offer that as perhaps a starting point to thinking about that, that particular ways that you approached lived experience in your disciplines. Whoever would like to start off.

Well, I guess I could start. I mean, I think that anthropology, really the premise of anthropology, is the study of lived experienced in its many, many complexities. So I would say for us at least, this is very familiar territory. But what makes it unusual — just many thanks to my co-panelists, Sara and Jennifer, for these amazing opening remarks — they showed how many layers there are to thinking about energy. You need to think about the forms of knowledge involved, the forms of desire, the institutions, the infrastructures. So I think that it’s not even, I mean, lived experience captures a lot. And I think as we want to explore it, we have to think about what are the strategies for maybe revealing some of the habits we have that are so ingrained and so under-analyzed in some ways that we don’t even think about it. I do agree with what Jennifer said, that that’s kind of the premise of the Energy Humanities is to take what’s invisible and to sort of flip it over and to try to turn it on its back and look at all that’s there. Is there anything other panelists would like to add on? Well, I was trying to. Oh, look, we’re unmuting at the same time. I think that the kind of the go-to answer for this from the perspective of literary studies — and I should say that I’m a student of narrative.

Right. And so someone who works on poetry might object to my answer. But I would say that I think that the general assumption is that it’s realist fiction that is the genre that is meant to capture whatever it is meant by lived experience, whether psychological realism or social realisms, a narrative that gives the effect of real life. But to echo what Dominic said, I don’t think that it has been the case all the time. I wouldn’t say that it is only in the past decade or so that literary scholars, anthropologists, et cetera, are becoming cognizant of energy. But I do think what Sarah said about crisis, bringing the indispensability of labor and infrastructure into visibility has a corollary effect in literary studies. But I think what has passed for realism may well have included plenty of details that tell us about energy, but we have tended not to notice them. Right. And so I think that even what counts as realism is up for grabs in terms of the extent to which we grapple with the indispensability of energy and the unevenness of energy. My colleague Imre Szeman has a kind of wonderful phrase for talking about this, which is “fictions of surplus,” which he uses to describe both the historical fiction that the surplus of energy that has been made possible by fossil fuels over the past two centuries is anything but an unrepeatable historical anomaly. But the literary aspect of fiction of surplus is that literary fiction has not done anything to challenge that kind of fiction and bring it into visibility. I guess I’ll just out a couple of small things. I think I alluded to this a bit in my comments. And first, as a sidebar, I’m just intrigued and love the synergy’s across our three comments, which were entirely uncoordinated. But it’s amazing how there’s lots of ping-ponging and productive in generative ways. Thank you.

I alluded a little bit to social history really accessing lived experience and in important ways versus top-down history and also hinted at rhetoric versus reality in terms of thinking about what sources that we use, which voices we access and Jennifer’s presentation, talking about ads and idealized representations versus what things look like on the ground for different groups. So I think those are two important points just to draw those out again. But also one of the things that I’ve been thinking about is the “we.” I mean we’ve been using “we,” our actors use “we” and really starting to challenge and pull that apart. And also the political-strategic use of “we” in order to evade politics or keep power in the institutions and groups that already have them. So I think that asking questions about the “we” and generalizations that helps us get lived experience, but precisely looking at lived experience and everyday energy helps us problematize the “we” historically, contemporaneously, ethnographically in terms of policy, all those kinds of things in some really important ways. Yeah, I think this really connects to some of your recent work for all of our panelists, which have really drawn out these key concepts or metaphors. And I think we also saw some new ones tonight with the ideas of impasse, visibility, the idea of the non-user. But some of the ones from your recent work: the concept of solarity, the idea of an endscape, or the concept of extractivism. And I think given what you’ve all just said, it would be interesting to maybe reflect on the utility of these big ideas for organizing these really diverse ranges of lived experience, as well as to sort of think about the way they allow us an entry point into diverse forms of everyday life that we otherwise might not see.

Can I do that annoying political debate thing of answering my panelists, ignoring the question momentarily, and then getting to the question? Yeah. I mean, I think that Sara’s point about the “we” is incredibly important. And I also saw, I think maybe a question from Jeff Insko, which I feel is kind of maybe getting to this as well. And I can say that my own training from graduate school as a scholar of post-colonial literatures, specializing in Anglophone literatures of Africa and South Asia, has really…the way I think about the specialty of my work has changed entirely as I have begun working more on energy humanities. Right. So it’s Nigeria that got me into thinking about oil to begin with. But it has become almost impossible to ignore my own institutional location in North America, which is also the kind of it’s the center of gravity of well, I might get some pushback in this audience. But I tend to think of it as the center of gravity of the fossil fuel industry and also the center of gravity of the energy humanities. And so I think my work has become increasingly contrapuntal between the United States and places where I had been trained in graduate school to think about. Right. So the Mississippi Delta to the to the Niger Delta. And I think that’s all about not necessarily abjuring or disavowing the “we,” but thinking about the different textures of different kinds of we. Right. And another thing that I would say is that I don’t think it’s enough to say North America or the United States. And my thinking in energy humanities has been really shaped by two kinds of locations. One is the classroom. And I am in what now passes from my classroom, right in my home. But one is the classroom. And I think that that is very much the site of thinking about the we of a class and how it connects to these other spaces. And the other is my former institutional location at The University of Michigan, which was about forty-five minutes drive from Detroit. And so I think my students in Michigan had a very different understanding of what it means to think about oil and energy than my students in New York. And I started thinking about energy, you know, in the kind of downturn after the bankruptcy of Detroit. And so I think my students had a sense of a different kind of petro-violence than the petro-violence that I thought I was teaching them about, about the Niger Delta. I will now — sorry Trish, to have ignored your question — I will now take it up. And I would answer just very quickly. And I think that you’ve asked me to talk about extractivism. And the very quick thing that I would say about that is that if anything, I understand myself at this particular moment, as I’m not sure anti-extractivism. — and by that, like, of course, we’re all anti-extractivism — but what I mean by that specifically is suspicious of that category as a category of analysis, because I perceive in it a kind of conceptual creep where it’s it’s becoming a synonym for capitalism writ large. Right. And so losing the texture of what I had understood that word to mean. And here again, I’m cribbing from a piece that I co-wrote with Imre Szeman over the summer. And I think my favorite part of that piece is footnotes six or something like that, which I wrote to claim what had been commons, but would ask whether a dam is extractivist in the same way as a coal mine. And I don’t think that it is, even if we can think about all of the kind of harms and costs that dams inflict on on communities. To me, there’s a value in holding onto a particular kind of materiality in the concept of extractive, which I feel is being how do you say, metaphorized? Turned into a metaphor, in all kinds of directions. But I appreciate the question. Sorry for going on.

Thanks, Jennifer. I guess I could jump in and talk a little bit, speak to the sort of the concepts, in particular solarity as a concept that I think a lot of people are beginning to think with in the energy humanities as a kind of an opposite from petro-culture or something. We’re not quite sure. And, you know, I guess I would tell the parable of one of the early critical theorists in our European intellectual heritage, Karl Marx, who famously never really defined what, you know, a post-capitalist society was supposed to look like communism for him was the negation of the capitalist society of his era. It wasn’t the sort of newly formed, fully formed world that was supposed to follow it. And that’s caused a lot of confusion. And then a lot of people pointed and said, you know, you’re a lazy thinker, an incomplete thinker for this reason. But he was a Hegelian, and Hegelians don’t believe you can really understand things until you’re living in an experientially saturated way through them. So. what I would say about solarity is I don’t think we know what the post-petrol world is going to look like exactly I think what we can do, though, is we can both, on the one hand, think about the values that should inform that world. And we can also think about the kinds of acts of de-systematization of petro-culture that we can all participate in. What I call sabotage. I mean, the acts of sabotage that could be riding a bike instead of, you know, driving a car or flying less or demanding that your political representatives support decarbonization measures. There are a lot of ways you can participate through direct action or indirect action in that process. And I think that as a solarity comes, and we’ve seen this throughout time, many times, again, that something seems impossible to imagine until suddenly it’s there. And then you’re like, oh, of course, we should have known all along that this is what it was. And I think that one of the things I would say, and I’m saying this from a place of Houston, I’m saying it from the beating heart of petro-culture to you — is that the fossil fuel economy will end faster than we think. It’s already decisively on its way out. And in 20 years, we might be amazed to look back and say we didn’t see how fast it was going to end. So solarity is coming in some form or another. But I think to speak to the environmental justice question that was raised in Jeff’s question in the Q&A, that is the key issue: how not to fall into the grooves of the extractivism of the past, how not to build wind parks and solar farms in ways that dispossess people that don’t have. Create meaningful connections to landscapes and communities that prioritize the interests of global capital over the needs of people who live near to these installations. Those are the sorts of habits that we can actually have to work on to unmake so that we don’t end up creating a sort of solarized dystopia going forward. And that’s something that I think is or is a legitimate fear. I guess I’ll comment briefly on the concept that you alluded to Trish in terms of… I had this extraordinary once-in-a-lifetime trip to a small bard in Norway north of the Arctic Circle in January 2019 which seems like a billion years ago now, particularly given travel and pandemic and everything, during Polar Night. So it’s January during Polar Night. And I wrote a piece about the experience of being there and what it was like and thinking about energy and the landscapes of energy north of the Arctic Circle. And so I was playing with the concept of “endscape,” which builds on Dolly Jørgensen’s concept of “endling.” With “endling” being the last the last animal of the species that’s about to go extinct. So I was playing with the idea of endscape, of landscapes that are on the cusp of disappearance or are on their way out. Which, obviously, the Arctic is ground zero for that. And part of the point of the piece was also thinking explicitly and making visible my own implication in that very process at Svalbard. Right. Because I flew a gazillion miles and it took three days to get there and all this kind of stuff, as well as the other people who are part of this conference on darkness. I think I guess what I want to… there are two things I want to say about that that are related is, that “endscape” can be a very privileged category in terms of the futurity of landscape, rather than thinking about how many places are already endscapes or were endscapes 10 years ago or more. Right. And so anxieties about sea-level rise, say, on the coast of the United States versus islands or other parts of the world, which are already experiencing extensive change. And wrestling with the social and economic and political implications of that and so forth. So I haven’t really played with or developed this concept more. But I think what one of the things that’s important to me is to not take for granted that many people, particularly vulnerable people in North America and around around the world, are already living in endscapes, so to speak, and not imagine this is something that’s in the future, whether in your future, or just in the future. I think all of these comments and this sort of first chunk have really underscored something you had said earlier, Sara, right. Which was, you know, getting at this idea that the everyday can really give us strong insights into really profound questions about justice and ensuring justice. And so I want to invite our participants…our attendees, rather, to go ahead and begin sending in questions. I’m going to sort of shift to another round of questions. But we are going to open it to the audience very soon. And that will be great to have a good list of questions to start from. And so now I want to sort of talk explicitly about something that I think has come up in all of the answers, but to really come directly to this problem of futurity. And I think, you know, just taking a little bit of a shift, I was wondering if we could think about even just the idea of lived experience beyond the human right, so theorizing the lived experience as opposed to anthropocentric category, how we might conceive lived experience to include non-human forms of experience as well as human. And so that might be obviously the energy realities of the present as well as future modes of relationality with non-humans. I guess I could jump in on this. It’s a great prompt. Thanks so much Trish.

It reminds me a bit of one of my favorite energy humanities projects, environmental humanities projects that I’ve done in my life, which was working together with collaborators in Iceland and my partner Cymene Howe to create the world’s first memorial for a glacier lost in Iceland to climate change. The first of Iceland’s major glaciers to disappear to climate change. And we had a lot of interesting discussions talking about how do you mourn something that… How do you mourn the death of something that was never properly speaking alive? And how do you blend together sort of the the deep human traditions of thinking about Earth beings and their existence in places? And glaciers in Iceland have meant many different things in different times. And how do you acknowledge that alongside, accommodate it to human ritual and human understandings of death? And I’ll say that that whole process was incredibly, you know, powerful for me and really made me think a lot about how at least in terms of the losses that we’re experiencing, we have to be more present for them and we have to create communities of mourning around the changing world, the damaged planet that we inhabit now. And I actually think that the experience of attending to and really thinking about, say, the loss of a glacier is like something like the loss of a friend or some kin. It’s something that actually, I think has the potential to make us more engaged in the process of making sure that all the glaciers don’t go in the same way. So I do think that attention to the non-human, the anthropocentrism is very deeply set in us, especially in the north, in terms of thinking about, you know, how we relate to the world. But that’s something that we really have to try to disable as we move forward or try to find other ways of being human. I’ll say as an anthropologist, you know, the kind of European modernity that I was discussing in my presentation is pretty much a huge outlier to the rest of human cultures across time in terms of its, you know, its contempt for nature, its contempt for other species, frankly. And I think that’s something that, again, suggests that where we’re going is not simply just tweaking the existing system by putting up some solar panels and wind turbines, but we actually have to engage in a process of civilizational transformation at a more fundamental level. And that’s something that’s frightening. But also, when you think about it, very exciting, because this civilization has a lot of blood in its on its hands, if you will. And I think there’s a chance to make something better. I can jump in. I think there’s a synergy between what you just raised and something that I wanted to bring up kind of as a sidebar. There’s the classic question and history of science and particularly science studies about voice and representation or spokesperson and questions about who speaks for the non-human. Do scientists speak? What does that mean, particularly given that we know the ways in which science and scientists are shaped by cultural, historical, and other kinds of contexts. But that’s kind of a sidebar. What you’re just saying, I think about cultural abnormality of the West. That’s my exaggeration, exaggerated summary of what you just said. I was just thinking about the ways in which this question, which I really appreciate, is already predicated on certain assumptions and places and cultures and contexts. And I’m thinking about the ways in which this question wouldn’t make sense for many indigenous communities. And so what does it mean to be reflective, even about these categories like living, non-living, human, non-human. The question of kin and who are what counts as kin. And certainly there’s been a lot of work in environmental humanities about this, but also some debate between it and digital scholars and environmental humanists in terms of what does it mean to appropriate indigenous notions of kin to describe more complex relationships between the human and non-human and the more than human. So by way of response or engagement with this really important question, I actually just want to encourage us to think about the ways in which it’s already culturally defined in particular ways, and that that of itself, I think is important. Sorry. Yeah, I think I appreciate what Dominic was saying about a sense of loss. And I think that the words that resonate for me in this question are “relationality,” or the word is is “relationality” rather than “experience.” And perhaps, for the moment, I want to locate myself within a kind of European mindset in order to say that I am not confident that I can theorize non-human experience. Right. And I’m thinking partly with Dipesh Chakrabarty, who says that actually we humans can’t experience ourselves as a species. Right. And so relationality is therefore the word that really kind of that resonates for me in terms of understanding our relationship to energy as a multi or understanding relationships to energy as multi-species relationships. And maybe I’ll see if I can share my screen for a literary example that comes at this question in a different way. This is, I think, if I’m not mistaken, this is the very end of Italo Calvino’s story, The Petrol Pump, which is ostensibly a story about pumping gas, like pumping gas during the 1970’s oil shock. The first one in Italy. But as this protagonist is pumping gas, what he is imagining is, as you can read, the day in the future, when “the earth’s crust reabsorbs the cities, this plankton sediment that was humankind will be covered by geological layers of asphalt and cement until in millions of years’ time it thickens into oily deposits, on whose behalf we do not know.” And what I so love about this passage in the story is that it takes the geological fact of fossil fuels as tiny dead creatures, right, fossil fuels as fossilized life, and imagines a future in which humans become fossil fuels for another life form. Right. And so it uses the resources of fiction to imagine what a future human relationship to fuel as fuel might look like on behalf of another species.

Thank you all so much. That was really reminiscent, actually, of my environmental history students working through Bathsheba Demuth’s “Floating Coast,” this year. And just its a really wonderful and provocative discussion to have. So before we move over to audience questions, I’ll just pose one question, bring it all back around and let you give some, I guess, wrap-up comments before we move to the audience questions, which is just to think about really explicitly what role the study of history and culture can play in bringing about a just energy transition. I know we’ve already reflected on this quite a bit, but.

Okay, I can get started here. I can speak really specifically to the risk research that Cymene and I did on wind-power development in southern Mexico, the densest concentration of onshore wind parks anywhere in the world, primarily built upon ancestral indigenous lands of the binnizá and ikojts peoples. And without, you know, getting into the weeds on this too much, just to say that it’s been incredibly impressive in terms of just decarbonizing electricity, it’s been impressive from that standpoint. It’s a terrific development of over two gigawatts of clean electricity. So from that perspective, very impressive. But it’s also been extremely politically contentious, in part because the people who developed these projects had no understanding whatsoever of the specific history of this region, of the indigenous cultures there and of their long relationship to various extractivist projects in the past. So even if you’re only thinking of this from a pragmatic point of view of how can you create clean energy projects that people don’t hate? History and culture have an enormous role to play in this, as we found. And that’s simply, you know, trying to engage these communities in a serious way and understand where they’re coming from would have gone a long way towards creating trust and goodwill. And just to speak to Jennifer’s point about relationality. It’s all about relationality. This is all about trying to be in good relation to other beings, human beings, to human beings, us, to us as a species, to the ecologies that sustain us, and so forth. And I think history and culture are not perfect, but just the commitment to trying to understand, to try to communicate, to try to empathize with peoples and other beings with different histories, I think is really valuable in terms of getting out of the habit in which we’re trying to dominate the world. Right. Extract its resources and use it to feed our machines of productivity and prosperity. Because we’ve seen where that is going to go, and it’s going to go to ecocide and ultimately to the collapse of the civilization. And so it’s all too clear that we’re on that path. So I think that history and culture actually are incredibly important valuable lessons in information and ethics to offer us in that struggle to not allow that future to be foretold. I can go next, I guess. I mean, I’m thinking with my fellow panelists in terms of things that have already been said, and I think that, you know, the kind of classic transition from plantations to petroleum in the U.S. Gulf Coast is, you know, it kind of haunts my understanding of history, of energy transitions. And so what that tells us. And again, I’m stuck with Jeff Insko’s question on my screen. Right. So what that tells us is that the past is not past. Right. And Sara Pritchard has also invoked the really important idea that for so many people, a future of less energy or the costs of the current energy regime is already here. Right. And has been here for a long time. So the past is not past. The future is already here. And so I think I’m leaning actually more to the history than the culture part of the question. I think that the question of how one frames a narrative, how one frames a narrative of history, and how one tells the story of how we got here and who counts in that “we” is crucial to what transition looks like in the future. And so an idea that has stuck with me since I first read it is from the Nigerian writer and public intellectual Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie who says that what is important, or the narrative mode that entrenches injustice is starting the narrative from “secondly.” Right. And what she means by that is you begin the narrative when the violence has already happened and is normalized. Right. And so to refuse a historical narrative that begins from “secondly,” that begins with the violence already baked in, I think by analogy, I think it helps to chart a way toward a future where those modes of violence are not always already assumed. It’s hard to figure out how to add and build on to those great comments. So much has already been said. I think one thing I would add is the way many humanists are attentive to power. This is a super simple point and comment. But sometimes simple matters. Multiple forms of power in different kinds of contexts and different kinds of ways, but understanding how that works historically, culturally, and so forth, then helps us have a richer understanding when we’re debating the contemporary moment. I was kind of twitch about the lessons of history. I mean, yes, there are lessons of history. But then also, you know, I think all historians are trained to twitch at that. But I think if we have a much richer, deeper understanding of these layers and sediments of structures and power and violence and also opportunities and resistance, there are spaces there for thinking both creatively and pragmatically, to kind of link my two co-panelists’ comments.

Well, thank you so much again for talking through these ideas. I have so many more questions that I could ask. But I’m going to turn it now over to my colleague Firat to go ahead and moderate the discussion with our audience questions. Thanks Trish. And thanks to our panelists for the really remarkable reflections that they have provided us. And of course, as a price comes questions. I would like to start with one question I think related to our current moment of the pandemic and also related to one question we had in mind. This is from my Education City colleague Peter Martin. How does or might energy humanities engage or position the notion of well-being and thinking of Dominic’s concept of rebellion, Sara’s evident enjoyment of dog sledding and other experiences of Arctic darkness, Jennifer’s reading fiction, watching films for the planet. What is the value of playfulness and games for the energy humanities? So that’s the fun part in certain ways, right? We could see our interest in lived experiences that turn away from the high seriousness of global energy politics. Is there a political value in that affective shift and make us feel better?

I could start us off here, I mean, I think Jennifer has already talked about the importance of narratives and counter-narratives and creativity and imagination and the ways in which that can all be motivating or constraining. I think some of this affective shift when I was thinking about this question, for me, I think it helps us get out of declensions narratives or nihilistic narratives, even if we — again, asterisk, who’s the “we” here — We are facing daunting circumstances in many ways that this affective shift may provide more motivation or creativity in terms of creative responses to various challenges versus a threat of inaction. I think there’s the line about “if the ship’s sinking, let’s just party as the Titanic goes down.” Right. And the other thing that I was thinking about is actually going back to William Cronon’s “The Trouble with Wilderness” article. He has this line about there’s a problem with seeing all human use as abuse because it doesn’t…it fails to differentiate between different kinds of anthropocentric engagements with the natural world or non-human or more than human world or worlds. And therefore, it becomes a simplistic binary. If we act or change, that’s bad. Untouched wilderness supposedly is good, except that never existed anyway. So I think this more playful register — also, I was thinking about Holly Jean Buck’s idea of the “Charming Anthropocene” — that maybe it provides greater motivation for people rather than feeling overwhelmed, or the scale of issues is fundamentally not changeable or inactionable…unactionable? I don’t know, whatever. Maybe I can pick up on Sara’s last point. Sara, thanks so much. And this idea of sort of feeling trapped in the condition, you know, watching the train in slow motion, you know, collide with the car and not being able to feel like you have any agency to change things. And I do think that goes back to some of the earlier comments that we had about, you know, about can sort of sense of impasse and also the sense of sort of imaginative, you know, failure and where is I rooted? One of my suggestions is that, you know, what we’re up against — and we should realize that we’re up against it — is that petro-culture has filled our — for those of us privileged enough to have an abundance of energy at our disposal to live with this energy without conscience lifestyle — petro-culture has provided us with this rich sense memory archive of all these thrills and indulgences and conveniences and luxuries that petro-culture has given us. So when you talk about a radical break or a shift, immediately, I think people say, but I don’t have memories of this low-carbon future. I don’t I certainly don’t have positive memories, but I don’t have any memories of this low-carbon future. And so thus we tend to kind of retreat back to a sense of well, it must be impossible — or if it’s possible, it’s a dystopia of some kind. And so we fear it. And so it’s sort of easier to imagine apocalypse than the end of petro-culture. Just people said that about capitalism. I think the same goes for petro-culture. But this is why the humanities and especially the arts are so important. — speaking to the artists out there — because the arts have these amazing speculative and performative techniques for creating experiences and ideas and narratives and images that could be associated, that can kind of give us memories of these futures that we need…so desperately need. And I think there’s just you know, I enjoy the work I do with artists, maybe more than any, because I think that this is where you can maybe begin to sort of map out the possibilities for low-carbon pleasures. And honestly, you know, when you begin to think about it, many of the best things in life are low-carbon anyway. If you really begin to think about it, you know, the walks outside in the sun, the intimacies, you know, with your friends and partners and so forth. These are beautiful things that don’t require a lot of high carbon. When you begin to sort of re-rewire your pleasure circuits a little bit in that way, I think it can help a lot to sort of create the sense of possibility. So it’s this again. I don’t think it is one thing. It’s incremental work sort of reorganizing our desires and imagining sort of positive futures that are associated with low-carbon lifestyles. So I think this is the work that has to be done. Yeah, I can definitely build off of that with regard to what Dominic says about, you know, having no memories of low-carbon futures. One of my favorite ideas from Graeme Macdonald is reading 19th-century fiction and doing what he calls chronological backflips to understand what a low-carbon future might look like based on reading, you know, an earlier version of that. And so he reads 19th-century novels for an account of what it means to have to walk everywhere. And it’s a kind of delightful thought experiment. And I’m thinking of a Gayatri Spivak’s description of the work of the humanities as the non-coercive rearrangement of desire. And that’s kind of echoing what Dominic was saying about rewiring desire. And it seems to me that transition is coming. You know, whether we like it or not. And so I think one of the fundamental questions about energy in energy humanities is “what kind of transition do we want?” And so thinking about what a mindful transition to kind of echo the language of well-being, what a just transition would look like it, and how to take incremental steps toward getting there. And so I think that this means a redefinition of what well-being is and what we mean by well-being. What counts as well-being. And I think it would involve those kinds of relationality is that we’ve been talking about, and recognizing that well-being may not be the same as pleasure or what we have thought of as pleasure may be inimical to well-being. So I guess the last thing I would say to try to invoke the question of play is that, maybe it was two…it must have been actually two years ago now I was at an event — I think Dominic must have been there as well — on solarity And what I did in my solarity workshop was, with the help and in the company of others, I, in theory, in actuality, but I in theory made my own solar panel. And I say “in theory,” because it didn’t work. My solar panel didn’t work. Other people’s solar panels did work. And so I think part of what was so wonderful about this experience of making my own solar panel was letting go of the idea that what I do is, some kind of mastery. Right. And kind of leaning into a kind of DIY mode in which I was doing things I didn’t know how to do. Right. And in the sense of play. And I think part of what was powerful to me as I was struggling in frustration to make my solar panel was the idea that the way that solar panels work is that, you know, the electrons are bouncing on these surfaces and they’re incredibly inefficient. Solar panels, they kind of they transform into usable energy only a very small percentage of what’s actually happening with those electrons. And I have kind of held onto that as a metaphor for letting go of the demand for productivity. Right. Letting go of the idea that every electron bouncing in my mind must lead to something. So I think this gets both to the question that Firat raised about play. Where is the place of play? And I think play might be partly about letting go of that Cara Daggett idea of energy that Dominic mentioned that’s all about work. And we’re worrying about waste. Right. And so to think about a way of being that isn’t just about work. And that is about play. And it is about doing things that we don’t know how to do yet. Right.

Thank you so much. We have about five to six minutes left. So in the interest of time, I’ll try to sort of put some of the questions in a thematic cluster. I think in a way they all point out at the unevennesses of lived experiences of energy, especially in the Global South. I think the questions that Petra, Diana, Danya, Jeff, in particular, have been asking center around that question. So to start with Petra’s question, do you agree that an everyday approach helps acknowledge fragmented experiences that are based in different energy regimes that coexist, not just oil, and allows for complexity of historical agency of energy actors, who are never only producers or consumers of energy? Danya Saleh’s question: What do the panelists working in Energy Humanities think about the different green new deals, peoples Green New Deal, Red Deal from the Red Nation, they might they map out ways forward beyond riding bikes and also center reparations to the Global South. Diana’s comment also is in that line in differentiating extractivism — coal versus dam — are we also differentiating petro-violence versus hydro-violence? And finally, I think Jeff’s question, some of it was and in certain ways, but worth asking still, how do we work toward a post-petrol, that is also a just one.

I can start and just be very quick. I’ve actually oh, there it is. I had lost Petra’s question, but I want to answer it by way of a photograph from Ed Kashi. This is in the collection. Curse of the Black Gold: 50 years of Oil in the Niger Delta. And this image is so powerful to me because it is an image of energy simultaneity. Right. So we can understand that these enormous tanks here contain fossil fuels that will be piped elsewhere and not for use in Nigeria. And so we see the kind of muscular labor of these men chopping wood to burn. So we see kind of two energy regimes operating at the same time. And so I think that I’ve lost her question again. But I think that thinking about the unevenness in one place is, a really helpful way of thinking. And about the question of violence, I would say…I think somebody else had asked about dirty-clean fuel and petro-violence versus hydro violence. And I think that the very quick thing I would say about that is that it feels to me, and this might not be right, but it feels to me that there is a tendency toward violence that is inherent in scaling up. Right. So I think many kinds of energy become violent or dirty through this process of scaling up. And I don’t know what to do about that. Right. But I feel like scale is important in thinking about those problems. I could follow on that a little bit. That’s a really interesting point, Jennifer, the last point about the violence of scaling up and I think that there definitely is, this is another one of David Hughes’s arguments as one of the things that the plantation system did was to weave violence into sort of what we would think of as globalization in a very fundamental way so that you couldn’t have that transatlantic capitalism without a whole lot of violence being waged. And so and that’s sort of a legacy that we haven’t really come to terms with a lot of ways in terms of how much it’s fed into globalization more generally. The sense that, you know, the translocal flows are more important than what might happen to people in the communities where resource frontiers. And I think that’s always been an issue. And so a couple of thoughts. I mean, you know, one thought — and this comes out of a German solarity thinkers like Hermann Scheer — is to really sort of move towards hyper-local energy, to really focus on, you know, you use the energy you can make in your community or you can make in your home and that you don’t need the sort of apparatus of sort of long-distance energy systems. In fact, as he saw, like a lot of state violence and was really wrapped up in sort of, you know, managing those long distance flows, like why else is the United States invading the Middle East all the time, if not to guarantee its petro-political, you know, sort of systems? So I think that’s one model. And then there’s another model, which may be more utopian, but I think as we’re thinking about, is are there ways we could move towards more ethical kinds of globalization, more ethical kinds of trans-local relationships? Are they necessarily violent? Can we imagine that there are other models available? And I think that there are some that are out there, you know, that that might exist as alternatives that could be explored. But I think on the whole, you know, it’s probably an issue, as you say, Jennifer, that really has to be thought of as a problem of scale and how we can scale the energy transition in a way that reduces the violence of the previous energy systems. Again, the danger of going last, a lot’s been said, but Dominic, you just used the word ethical. I’m not sure if I have a lot to add in terms of of unevenness, in equality, power, justice, and so forth, because that’s definitely been a thread running through our presentations and the conversations and questions. And so I’m left with the question of how do “we” — again, the problematic “we” — how do we get people to care about ethics and justice and others, whether it’s local, others or just… And also acknowledge the ways in which many of us are already, you know, are implicated in systems that are dependent on unevenness and extraction and violence in order to have energy or convenience or ease of luxury elsewhere.

Thank you so much. Our time is now up. My colleague Danyel Reiche had asked, and I won’t expect you to answer this question, but his question was, what are the issues unique to Qatar and the Gulf when discussing lived everyday energy experiences? I’ll keep this question is an excuse to bring you to Doha when conditions permit. But it is also a question that, as a research group, we are aiming to delve into in detail. Now, I would like to hand it over to Dean Dallal to provide his conclusion or remarks.

Thank you so much for this extremely interesting discussion and the great launch for our project. I hope the audience will join us in future activities and I hope we will, before long, we’ll be able to host you here in Doha. Thank you so much.

Resources

Books

Energy Humanities: An Anthology, edited by Imre Szeman and Dominic Boyer
Energopolitics: Wind and Power in the Anthropocene, by Dominic Boyer
Fueling Culture: 101 Words for Energy and Environment, edited by Imre Szeman, Jennifer Wenzel, and Patricia Yaeger
Confluence: The Nature of Technology and the Remaking of the Rhône, by Sara B. Pritchard
New Natures: Joining Environmental History with Science and Technology Studies, edited by Dolly Jørgensen, Finn Arne Jørgensen, and Sara B. Pritchard
Technology and the Environment in History, by Sara B. Pritchard and Carl A. Zimring
The Disposition of Nature: Environmental Crisis and World Literature, by Jennifer Wenzel
Bulletproof: Afterlives of Anticolonial Prophecy in South Africa and Beyond, by Jennifer Wenzel
Living Oil: Petroleum Culture in the American Century, by Stephanie LeMenager
Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History, by Sidney W. Mintz
A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None, by Kathryn Yusoff
The Birth of Energy: Fossil Fuels, Thermodynamics, and the Politics of Work, by Cara New Daggett
Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil, by Timothy Mitchell
Lifeblood: Oil, Freedom, and the Forces of Capital, by Matthew T. Huber
The Next Catastrophe: Reducing Our Vulnerabilities to Natural, Industrial, and Terrorist Disasters, by Charles Perrow
The Multichannel Retail Handbook, by Chris Jones
Power Lines: Phoenix and the Making of the Modern Southwest, by Andrew Needham
The Work of Invisibility: Radiation Hazards and Occupational Health in South African Uranium Production, by Gabrielle Hecht
The Oil Lamp: Poems, by Ogaga Ifowodo
Orientalism, by Edward W. Said
Curse of The Black Gold: 50 Years of Oil in the Niger Delta, by Ed Kashi

Articles

Wenzel, Jennifer. “How to read for oil.” Resilience: A Journal of the Environmental Humanities 1, no. 3 (2014): 156-161.
Cronon, William. “The trouble with wilderness: or, getting back to the wrong nature.” Environmental history 1, no. 1 (1996): 7-28.
Buck, Holly Jean. “On the possibilities of a charming Anthropocene.” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 105, no. 2 (2015): 369-377.

Films

Not Ok – Cymene Howe and Dominic Boyer

The Impact of Climate Change on Agriculture in South Asia
2021-04-19 12:00 - 13:30 (Europe/Moscow)
Agriculture is one of the most vulnerable sectors to the effects of climate change. The change in average temperature, rainfall, changes in pests and diseases, variations in the atmospheric Carbon Dioxide (CO2) and ground-level ozone concentrations, as well as changes in sea level can have a direct and negative impact on food production and farming communities. Despite technological advances made in the 20th century, climate change still has a linear and often adverse impact on agricultural productivity. While this is a global phenomenon, South Asia is one of the most susceptible regions to the effects of climate change. Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka together comprise one of the world’s most densely populated regions and are all also highly reliant on agriculture as an economic sector. About 57 percent of South Asia’s landmass is devoted to farming, while nearly 60 percent of its population is engaged in agricultural production in one form or another. Much of this activity is undertaken by vulnerable small landholders, while women also play a significant role. According to Food and Agriculture Organization data, in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, Sri Lanka, and Bhutan, more than 60 percent of women work in the agricultural sector. An increasing population, natural resource degradation, and the impact of high rates of poverty means that the region is already contending with food insecurity. This will certainly be amplified to reach critical levels with the anticipated effects of climate change. While direct impacts are associated with the rise in temperatures, indirect impacts include insufficient availability of water, due to decline in annual rainfall and inadequate inputs of water, and changing soil moisture status and pest and disease incidence due to lack of enough fertilizers. The current situation has significantly impacted small-holder rainfed farmers who constitute the majority of farmers in this region and hold low financial and technical capacity to adapt to climate variability and change. The agricultural productivity of the region is in decline, and with fluctuation in crop production and a rise in market prices, the ongoing agrarian crisis is predicted to increase food insecurity and poverty in South Asian countries.

Speakers:

Vaibhav Chaturvedi is a fellow at The Council on Energy, Environment and Water and an economist who leads The Council’s work on Low-Carbon Pathways. His research focuses on energy and climate change mitigation policy issues, especially those impacting India, within integrated assessment modeling framework of the Global Change Assessment Model (GCAM)

N.H. Ravindranath is a professor at the Center for Sustainable Technologies at the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore, India. His research is focused on dimensions of Climate Change: Mitigation Assessment, Carbon Sequestration Modeling, Impact of Climate Change and Vulnerability Assessment in Forest and Agro-ecosystems. He has also worked on Bioenergy, Biofuels and Biomass Production, and Citizen Science.

Moderator: Anatol Lieven, Professor at Georgetown University in Qatar.

The Gospel of Work and Money: Global Histories of Industrial Education Virtual Working Group II
2021-05-25 17:00 - 19:00 (Europe/Moscow)
On May 25, 2021, the Center for International and Regional Studies (CIRS) at Georgetown University Qatar held the second virtual working group under its research initiative on The Gospel of Work and Money: Global Histories of Industrial Education. This virtual working group was the first in a series of meetings that will be held between May and August 2021, to present and discuss the chapters contributions for the project. During the May meeting two papers were presented and received feedback and comments from the group.

The first paper titled, “American Sociology’s Promotion of the Industrial Education Model and the Reification of Race,” was presented by Dr. Julia Bates. The paper addresses American sociology’s theoretical promotion of the Industrial Education model. The paper reviews three main sociologists’ use of sociological theory to advocate for the industrial education model. After the first World War, the U.S. Department of Labor worked with a commercial philanthropic institution called the Phelps Stokes Fund to transfer educational policies designed for African Americans to West Africa and South Africa. The US government used and promoted the industrial education model used at Tuskegee and the Hampton institutes for African American education. This model emphasized manual labor, Christian character formation, and political passivity as a form of racial uplift. The model heavily relied upon prominent theories in the sociology of race to propagate this model. Thomas Jesse Jones, who was the educational director of the Phelps Stokes Fund, in particular advocated for the transnational development of the model. W.E.B. Du Bois, a prominent sociologist who was marginalized by the U.S government and American sociology, critiques this model in his works The Crisis and Darkwater. Bates argues that from the works of Jones and Dubois two different sociological conceptions of race emerge. The author will examine the U.S. state’s decision to link African Americans and Africans as similar objects of political intervention and look at Jones’s use of sociology to promote the model’s effect on sociological theories of race.

Dr. Elif Ekin Akşit presented the second paper titled, “Industrial Education in the Late Ottoman Empire and Modern Turkey: Gender, Egalitarianism, and Mathematics.” The paper traces the history of industrial schools in the Ottoman Empire and their subsequent continuation in modern Turkey. Dr. Akşit contends that the development of industrial education in the late Ottoman empire and modern Turkey took place within the context of the transformation from an empire to the republic, and adopting policies and practices of the West became the part and parcel of resisting colonialism. The paper discusses the development of the Girls Industrial Schools in the late Ottoman Empire and their importance in the general development of technical/scientific education and its relation to the ideology. The author proposes to study the question of what it meant to be industrial in the East and West, as well as trace the continuation of the industrial schools in the late-20th and early 21st centuries. These key queries will be addressed with the help of the data collected from students’ accounts as well as state documents on these schools. The article primarily focuses on the gendered dimension of the industrial schools because the author argues that their continuation in the Turkish republic made these girls’ schools the main pillar for establishing the revolution on the societal level.

CIRS will convene the next paper workshop for the project in June where three additional paper contributions will be presented and discussed.

For the meeting agenda, click here.For the participants’ biographies, click here.For the research initiative, click here.

Participants and Discussants:

Elif Ekin Akşit, Ankara University, TurkeyMaram Al-Qershi, CIRS – Georgetown University in QatarDanya Al-Saleh, University of Wisconsin–MadisonLukas Allemann, University of LaplandHossein Ayazi, Williams CollegeZahra Babar, CIRS – Georgetown University in QatarJulia Bates, Sacred Heart UniversityMisba Bhatti, CIRS – Georgetown University in QatarJoshua Frank Cárdenas, California Indian Nations CollegeOliver Charbonneau, University of GlasgowBronwen Everill, University of CambridgeArun Kumar, University of NottinghamJanne Laht, University of HelsinkiSuzi Mirgani, CIRS – Georgetown University in QatarDolf-Alexander Neuhaus, Free Berlin UniversitySarah Steinbock-Pratt, University of AlabamaKarine Walther, Georgetown University in QatarElizabeth Wanucha, CIRS – Georgetown University in QatarHelge Wendt, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (MPIWG) Berlin

Article by Misba Bhatti, Research Analyst at CIRS

The Gospel of Work and Money: Global Histories of Industrial Education Virtual Working Group III
2021-06-08 17:00 - 19:00 (Europe/Moscow) | Education City, Al Luqta St, Ar-Rayyan, Doha, Qatar
March 19, 2023

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On June 8, 2021, the Center for International and Regional Studies convened a third virtual working group under its research initiative on The Gospel of Work and Money: Global Histories of Industrial Education. During this paper workshop two chapter contributions were presented and discussed, which received in-depth feedback from the group.

Dr. Bronwen Everill, presented the first paper titled, ““The Dignity of Labor”: Liberian Industrial Education in West Africa.” The chapter looks at the role of Liberia within West Africa, as a site of educational innovation and the launch of US state-based missionary and educational enterprises. The author explores the close internal relationship between Liberia and Sierra Leonean and the use of education as a way of maintaining Liberian sovereignty. By the end of the 19th century, Liberian engineers were training African workers for plantation labor, domestic housework, and for skilled and unskilled industrial labor in places as far away as German Togo, British Nigeria, and the Belgian Congo. At the start of the 20th century, Liberians had become part of a mobile class of African engineers, missionaries, and educators spreading American values and ideas on the continent. The paper addressed the literature about Liberia and its use of education in their struggle for sovereignty and independence. The author argues that Liberians used whatever means at their disposal to ensure that Liberia was not incorporated into the British or French Empire, by ensuring their effective control over and domination of the indigenous populations of Liberia.

Next Dr. Helge Wendt presented his paper titled, “Industrial-Technological Education in Spanish America during the Second Half of the Nineteenth Century.” The paper provides a comparative study of early industrial education schools in five Latin American countries i.e. Chile, Argentina, Mexico, Cuba, and Colombia. These schools of Arts and Trades were opened in the 19th century with the goal of training young men, and later young women, in practical and technical fields of production. The author states that the history of industrial education in these countries can be divided into different initiatives related to higher education, primary education, professional training, and further training. In this comparative study, Wendt wants to understand the school foundations and subsequent reforms in their local, inter-local, national and international contexts. School regulations, teachers and student recruitments play a special role in the analysis of the different developments. Also, connections of the school with the existing school system and the hopes for stimuli for the economic activity in the respective country will be studied.

The third paper workshop for the project is scheduled for the end of June, in which three scholars will present their draft papers and receive commentary.

For the meeting agenda, click here.

For the participants’ biographies, click here.

For the research initiative, click here.

Participants and Discussants:

Maram Al-Qershi, CIRS – Georgetown University in Qatar

Danya Al-Saleh, University of Wisconsin–Madison

Hossein Ayazi, Williams College

Zahra Babar, CIRS – Georgetown University in Qatar

Julia Bates, Sacred Heart University

Misba Bhatti, CIRS – Georgetown University in Qatar

Oliver Charbonneau, University of Glasgow

Bronwen Everill, University of Cambridge

Arun Kumar, University of Nottingham

Suzi Mirgani, CIRS – Georgetown University in Qatar

Dolf-Alexander Neuhaus, Free Berlin University

Sarah Steinbock-Pratt, University of Alabama

Karine Walther, Georgetown University in Qatar

Elizabeth Wanucha, CIRS – Georgetown University in Qatar

Helge Wendt, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (MPIWG) Berlin

Article by Misba Bhatti, Research Analyst at CIRS

The Gospel of Work and Money: Global Histories of Industrial Education Virtual Working Group IV
2021-06-29 17:00 - 19:30 (Europe/Moscow) | Education City, Al Luqta St, Ar-Rayyan, Doha, Qatar
On June 29, 2021, the Center for International and Regional Studies (CIRS) convened the fourth virtual workshop under its research initiative on The Gospel of Work and Money: Global Histories of Industrial Education. During this paper workshop, three project contributors presented their draft papers and received in-depth feedback from the group.

Dr. Arun Kumar initiated the discussion with the presentation of his paper titled, “Christian Labour and the Cawnpore Mission Industrial School.” The chapter traces the history of the Cawnpore Mission Industrial School and examines the detailed relationship that Christian missionaries in India developed with labor and industries in the 19th and 20th centuries. The Cawnpore School belonged to the Society for the Propagation of Gospels in Foreign Parts (SPG), which was a missionary society of the Church of England and had a significant presence in the British Empire. The Cawnpore Industrial School along with providing special industrial courses trained Christian converts into industrious and useful workers and disciplined them to become modern workers. Kumar proposes to explore the industrial school’s mission, which was an institution part of what Christian missionaries called ‘industrial mission/work’. The author argues that these schools were the practical results of the close nexus of colonial Christianity, capitalism, and native labor. Using the Cawnpore Mission Industrial School as a case study the author plans to unfold this argument through a local history of the school.

Dr. Mishal Khan and Zahra Babar presented the next paper titled, “(Im)mobile and (Un)skilled: The Paradox of Technical Education and the Pakistani Migrant in the Gulf.” In this chapter, the authors situate contemporary forms of labor migration within the longer history of capitalism connecting South Asia and the Gulf. Colonial era practices around the distribution and reallocation of labor and methods of disciplining and training docile workforces were rooted in particular racial imaginings and valuations of South Asian workers. Providing a case study of Pakistan’s current efforts to “upskill” their citizenry through technical education and thus enhance their chances for success in the Gulf, the authors draw connections between the present and past marginalized role of the South Asian workers, paying attention to the colonial and postcolonial policies and infrastructures that have maintained these valuations even while purporting to condemn them.

Dr. Christine Whyte presented the last paper of the workshop, titled, ““He looks wistfully at shore”: empire, slavery and the training of boys on-board the HMS Mars, 1869-1929.” The article details the history and experiences of the children who were recruited to live and serve on-board the HMS Mars, a certified industrial school “training ship” in Dundee, Scotland. Dr. Whyte writes that the policy of confining destitute, and criminally sentenced children to a residential training ship emerged from three different trends in Victorian Britain: carceral, philanthropic, and imperial. There is an interconnection between poverty, criminalization, and empire, which can be seen in the function and form of the industrial school created in Britain and the creation and maintenance of a reformatory system of ‘training for empire’ which used criminally charged poor children as enforcers of imperial power globally. The chapter will attempt to uncover some of the carceral and imperial influences on industrial education for poor and homeless boys in Scotland. Dr. Whyte states that the paper will try to shed light on the experiences of the children that served on the ship, the views of their parents, as well as the home communities, as these have remained obscure.

The next paper workshop for the project is scheduled to take place in July, in which three additional contributors will present and discuss their draft papers.

For the meeting agenda, click here.For the participants’ biographies, click here.For the research initiative, click here.

Participants and Discussants:

Maram Al-Qershi, CIRS – Georgetown University in QatarHossein Ayazi, Williams CollegeZahra Babar, CIRS – Georgetown University in QatarJulia Bates, Sacred Heart UniversityMisba Bhatti, CIRS – Georgetown University in QatarOliver Charbonneau, University of GlasgowBronwen Everill, University of CambridgeMishal Khan, The University of Texas AustinArun Kumar, University of NottinghamSuzi Mirgani, CIRS – Georgetown University in QatarDolf-Alexander Neuhaus, Free Berlin UniversitySarah Steinbock-Pratt, University of AlabamaKarine Walther, Georgetown University in QatarElizabeth Wanucha, CIRS – Georgetown University in QatarHelge Wendt, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (MPIWG) BerlinChristine Whyte, University of Glasgow

Article by Misba Bhatti, Research Analyst at CIRS

The Gospel of Work and Money: Global Histories of Industrial Education Virtual Working Group V
2021-07-13 17:00 - 19:30 (Europe/Moscow) | Education City, Al Luqta St, Ar-Rayyan, Doha, Qatar
The Center for International and Regional Studies (CIRS) convened the fifth virtual workshop under its research initiative, The Gospel of Work and Money: Global Histories of Industrial Education, on July 13, 2021. During this workshop, three project contributors presented their draft papers and received in-depth feedback from the group.

The group discussion was initiation by Dolf-Alexander Neuhaus, who presented his article titled, “Industrial Education in Korea from the 1880s to the 1930s.” The chapter looks at the evolution of industrial education in Korea while it was under Japanese colonial rule. The author argues that during this period a multilayered education system existed in Korea. The industrial education model was built by the missionaries and the YMCA, to instill Koreans with a Protestant work ethic and teach them about industrial labor and capitalism. However, many of the Korean nationalist leaders who had converted to Christianity, saw industrialization as a requirement to attain “civilization and enlightenment” or “self-strengthening.” Using a variety of sources, such as the writings of Korean educators, missionary reports as well as official colonial documents, Neuhaus aims to explore how the missionary efforts for industrial education and colonial education policy are interconnected. The chapter will examine the industrial education policies set up by the Japanese colonial government, as well as look at the private learning facilities set up by the YMCA in Korea during the early decades of the 20th century.

Lukas Alleman’s chapter titled “Boarding School Education in the Soviet Arctic – Rationalizing and Industrializing Away Indigenous Livelihoods,” examines the Soviet Union’s industrial educational efforts targeting indigenous Arctic communities. The author suggests that there are ideological commonalities between modern ‘Western’ nations and the Soviet State when it comes to the treatment of indigenous communities, and their assimilation and integration via educational systems. The paper draws on ethnographic material to provide an empirically-based account of the Sámi, in the Kola Peninsula, who in multiple ways were impacted by different forms of state efforts to mainstream them into Soviet economic life. These development policies among others included intensified boarding schooling of the indigenous children which almost never played out as originally intended and contributed to urbanizing indigenous livelihoods and dissolving family structures.

Hossein Ayazi presented the last paper titled, “Plantation Pedagogies, Counterrevolutionary Geographies: Agricultural Development, Industrial Education, and Firestone Natural Rubber Co.” The chapter looks at the changing nature of U.S.-Liberia relations and the work of Firestone Natural Rubber Company within the independent West African republic in order to trace the specific social processes of reproduction that helped restage colonial possession, plantation dispossession, and differentially racialized devaluation toward the emerging terms of international finance and development under U.S. leadership. Using Booker Washington Agricultural and Industrial Institute (BWI), which was founded in 1929 in Kakata, Liberia, as a case study, the author details United States’ agricultural education and manual training efforts within Liberia and argues that by the mid-20th century, the “gospel of work and money” professed by U.S. business leaders, state officials, reformers, social scientists and others became the gospel of national independence, economic internationalism, and bureaucratic rationality, thus containing the convergent anti-colonial and anti-capitalist insurgences that characterized the agrarian periphery of the U.S. and European empires across the first half of the 20th century.

The last paper workshop for the project will be held in Fall 2021.

For the meeting agenda, click here.For the participants’ biographies, click here.For the research initiative, click here.

Participants and Discussants:

Elif Ekin Akşit, Ankara University, TurkeyMaram Al-Qershi, CIRS – Georgetown University in QatarLukas Alleman, University of LaplandHossein Ayazi, Williams CollegeZahra Babar, CIRS – Georgetown University in QatarJulia Bates, Sacred Heart UniversityMisba Bhatti, CIRS – Georgetown University in QatarOliver Charbonneau, University of GlasgowBronwen Everill, University of CambridgeMishal Khan, The University of Texas AustinArun Kumar, University of NottinghamSuzi Mirgani, CIRS – Georgetown University in QatarDolf-Alexander Neuhaus, Free Berlin UniversityKarine Walther, Georgetown University in QatarHelge Wendt, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (MPIWG) Berlin

Article by Misba Bhatti, Research Analyst at CIRS

The Gospel of Work and Money: Global Histories of Industrial Education Virtual Working Group VI
2021-09-21 17:00 - 19:00 (Europe/Moscow) | Education City, Al Luqta St, Ar-Rayyan, Doha, Qatar
On September 21, 2021, the Center for International and Regional Studies (CIRS) hosted the final paper workshop under its research initiative, The Gospel of Work and Money: Global Histories of Industrial Education. During the meeting, two draft papers were presented and comprehensively discussed, by the convened scholars.

Dr. Sarah Steinbock-Pratt, initiated the group discussion by presenting her paper titled, “It Is the Work That Counts – Industrial Education in the Philippines.” The paper provided a comprehensive history of industrial education in the Philippines and examined its role and importance as a tool used by the US colonizers to pacify the Filipinos. The author contended that industrial education became a direct way to control the labor and economically develop the Philippines. Though different schooling models were developed for Christians and non-Christians populations, by 1909-1910 industrial education had become central to the education system in the Philippines and remained so even after the Monroe report. The model of industrial education implemented in the Philippines, by the US, had its roots in and was adopted from educations systems developed for Native Americans, African Americans, and the Spanish industrial schools. The author argued that the public-school system in the Philippines was connected to other institutions, such as the penal system that were also attempting to shape and control labor. The Bilibid prison in Manila, which was established by the Spanish and later taken over by the American colonial state, utilized the same rhetoric of uplift, reform, and tutelage as the public schools, to control, discipline, and direct learning and labor, among the Filipinos.

Danya Al-Saleh presented her paper titled, “Technical Petro-Education and the Future of Fossil-Fueled Capitalism in Qatar,” which looked at a specific technical training program offered by the College of North Atlantic- Qatar (CNA-Q), a satellite campus of a Canadian community college in Qatar. The college offers a Technical Certificate Program, which is designed in partnership with Qatar Petroleum (QP) to prepare Qatari students to work as entry-level technicians for the company. The author placed and contextualized this program within the longer history of technical and vocational education in the Qatar’s oil and gas industry. The paper provided that technical and vocational education has historically been a contested space in Qatar, particularly as development in the country depends on immigrant labor. Al-Saleh argues that the underlying contradiction in CNAQ/QP’s program is that it is designed to produce Qatari manual labor for the oil and gas industry in an era when the country’s ruling class are promoting education as a mechanism for producing Qataris who will manage and innovate a future knowledge economy. She examined two ways in which this contradiction in the contemporary moment reveals unresolved conflicts over technical petro-education in Qatar; the complex relationship between national and “foreign” technical labor and the clash of capitalism with the reforms to encourage transferability and upward mobility for the program’s students.

From May to September 2021, CIRS hosted five paper workshops for authors to present their draft chapters and receive commentary from the group. CIRS plans to publish these research papers in an edited collection in the near future.

For the meeting agenda, click here.For the participants’ biographies, click here.For the research initiative, click here.

Participants and Discussants:

Elif Ekin Akşit, Ankara University, TurkeyMaram Al-Qershi, CIRS – Georgetown University in QatarDanya Al-Saleh, University of Wisconsin–MadisonHossein Ayazi, Williams CollegeZahra Babar, CIRS – Georgetown University in QatarMisba Bhatti, CIRS – Georgetown University in QatarOliver Charbonneau, University of GlasgowMishal Khan, The University of Texas AustinArun Kumar, University of NottinghamJanne Laht, University of HelsinkiSuzi Mirgani, CIRS – Georgetown University in QatarDolf-Alexander Neuhaus, Free Berlin UniversitySarah Steinbock-Pratt, University of AlabamaKarine Walther, Georgetown University in QatarElizabeth Wanucha, CIRS – Georgetown University in QatarHelge Wendt, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (MPIWG) BerlinClyde Wilcox, Georgetown University in Qatar

Article by Misba Bhatti, Research Analyst at CIRS

Activism in Exile: Diasporic Communities in the Wake of the Arab Uprisings
2021-09-30 19:00 - 20:30 (Europe/Moscow) | Education City, Al Luqta St, Ar-Rayyan, Doha, Qatar
The Arab uprisings, which saw the mobilization of millions of citizens across the Middle East and North Africa, produced new exiled communities at a massive scale. Refugees made their way to countries all over the world, escaping economic pressures, political repression and state violence. In host countries, the new (and old) diasporic communities have often exercised what scholars define as “voice after exit.” Enabling conditions in the host state can allow for new forms of social and political mobilization and solidarity-building that are difficult to achieve under repressive regimes at home. But anti-regime diaspora activism after the onset of the 2011 Arab uprisings demonstrates that combating authoritarianism from afar is a challenging and complex phenomenon. Regimes have increasingly demonstrated a determination and capacity to repress diaspora activism through relying on their own formal and informal transnational networks of supporters. Middle Eastern diasporic communities are also far from homogenous, as their experiences, conditions, identities, agendas, interests and organizational forms may vary widely. Polarization among Middle Eastern diasporas is rife. Diasporas’ capacity to mobilize successfully and play an influential role is also highly dependent on the political and social conditions in their host state.

This panel of scholars, activists, and practitioners seeks to explore the demography of these recent diasporas, their forms of community organization, and modes of political mobilization. Among other things, this panel asks what is “new” about these recently formed exiled communities, especially in light of the historical legacies of political organization by diaspora communities since the latter half of the twentieth century. The panel also seeks to explore the role of the state in two contexts. How do local political and socioeconomic conditions in the host states as well as the changing contours of authoritarianism in the countries of origin impact the forms of mobilization that these communities have pursued in recent years? Other themes to be explored include changing notions of political agency and citizenship rights, the role of transnational networks and civil society organizations, the impact of digital communication technologies, transformations in youth culture among exiled communities, and identifying new ideological and intellectual trends within diaspora communities.

Featuring

Noha Aboueldahab is a nonresident fellow in the Foreign Policy program at Brookings and a fellow at the Brookings Doha Center. She is an award-winning specialist in transitional justice and the author of Transitional Justice and the Prosecution of Political Leaders in the Arab Region: A comparative study of Egypt, Libya, Tunisia and Yemen (Hart, 2017). Her most recent Brookings piece discusses how Western policymakers can engage the new Arab diasporas. Her forthcoming book examines the role of the new Arab diasporas in transitional justice and accountability. Aboueldahab is Co-Chair of the Transitional Justice and Rule of Law Interest Group at the American Society of International Law.

Nadwa Al-Dawsari is a researcher, conflict practitioner, and policy analyst with over 20 years of field experience in peacebuilding, nonprofit management, and conflict-sensitive development. Areas of expertise include business development, managing organizational start-up and growth, program assessment and evaluation, conflict analysis, tribes and informal governance, nonstate armed actors, and security sector reform.

Dana Moss is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Notre Dame. She received her PhD in Sociology from the University of California, Irvine. Her research and teaching focus on collective resistance against repression, authoritarianism, revolutions; transnational activism, diasporas, immigrants; and the Middle Eastern region. Her current book project, The Arab Spring Abroad, investigates how and to what extent anti-regime diaspora activists in the US and Great Britain mobilized to support the 2011 uprisings in Libya, Syria, and Yemen. Her next book project will examine how and why members of military institutions resist participating in state- sanctioned violence. To date, her work has been published in venues such as the American Sociological Review, Social Forces, Social Problems, Mobilization: An International Journal, and Comparative Migration Studies. She comes to the University of Notre Dame from the University of Pittsburgh (2016-20), where she was awarded the 2020 David and Tina Bellet Excellence in Teaching Award.

Lea Muller-Funk is a Research Fellow at the German Institute of Global and Area Studies, where her research focuses on migration aspirations and drivers in (forced) migration, migration governance, and diaspora politics with a geographical focus on the Middle East, North Africa and Europe. Previously, she was a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Research Fellow at the Department of Sociology at the University of Amsterdam and a postdoctoral fellow at the Department of Politics and International Relations at the University of Oxford. Muller-Funk earned a joint PhD in Comparative Politics and Arabic Studies (summa cum laude) from the Centre des Recherches Internationales (CERI) at Sciences Po Paris and the Department for Near Eastern Studies at Vienna University in 2016.

Abdullah Al-Arian (Moderator) is an associate professor of History at Georgetown University in Qatar. He received his doctorate in History from Georgetown University and his master’s degree in Sociology of Religion from the London School of Economics and his BA in Political Science from Duke University. He is editor of the “Critical Currents in Islam” page on the Jadaliyya e-zine. He is also a frequent contributor to the Al-Jazeera English network and website. His first book, entitled Answering the Call: Popular Islamic Activism in Sadat’s Egypt was published by Oxford University Press in 2014. Professor Al-Arian teaches introductory courses on the history of the Middle East, as well as advanced topics courses covering the history of modern Egypt, Islamic social movements, and the history of US policy towards the Middle East.

Sami Hermez (Moderator) is the director of the Liberal Arts Program and associate professor in residence of anthropology at Northwestern University in Qatar. His research focuses on the everyday life of political violence in Lebanon, and his broader concerns include the study of social movements, the state, memory, security, and human rights in the Arab World. Hermez has held posts as visiting scholar in the Department of Anthropology at Harvard University, visiting professor of Contemporary International Issues at the University of Pittsburgh, visiting professor of anthropology at Mt. Holyoke College, and postdoctoral fellow at the Centre for Lebanese Studies, St. Antony’s College, Oxford University. His professional experience includes work with the United Nations Capital Development Fund and World Bank in New York and Sana’a, Yemen, as well as a stint with the UN Development Program in Beirut. At NU-Q he teaches classes in anthropology that include topics such as violence, gender and anthropology in the Middle East. He obtained his doctorate degree from the Department of Anthropology at Princeton University.

Reducing Islamophobic Attitudes? The Effect of Mohamed Salah and the World Cup 2022
2021-10-18 18:30 - 20:00 (Asia/Qatar) | Education City, Al Luqta St, Ar-Rayyan, Doha, Qatar
On October 18, 2021, CIRS hosted a webinar titled “Reducing Islamophobic Attitudes? The Effect of Mohamed Salah and the World Cup 2022” by Salma Mousa, Assistant Professor of Political Science at Yale University and a Georgetown University in Qatar alumna (Class of 2012). The talk was part of the CIRS lecture series under the “Building a Legacy: The Qatar FIFA World Cup 2022” research initiative. Mousa’s talk was based on previous research she conducted with her colleagues Ala’ Alrababa’h, Will Marble, and Alexander Siegel, titled “Can Exposure to Celebrities Reduce Prejudice? Estimating the Effect of Mohamed Salah on Islamophobic Attitudes and Behaviors,” which was published in the American Political Science Review in 2021.

Mousa’s lecture revolved around answering a central research question: “Can exposure to celebrities from stigmatized groups reduce prejudice?” In order to address this, Mousa and her research partners took the elite Egyptian soccer player Mohamed Salah as a case study in an attempt to quantify his effects on reducing Islamophobia. Salah was used as a case study, not only because he is one of the world’s most successful contemporary football players, but because he declares his Islamic faith in a public manner, both on and off the pitch.

In order to test their central hypothesis, Mousa and her colleagues approached the topic through a “contact theory” lens, which was first presented by Gordon Allport in relation to racial segregation in the United States. The theory states that contact across group lines can reduce prejudice under certain conditions, such as when this contact places people on equal footing, when it is endorsed by communal authorities and social norms, and, most importantly, when the contact involves people cooperating for a common goal. These kinds of contacts across group lines is well suited to building understanding and friendships, and, ultimately, to reducing prejudice.

Using data on hate crime reports throughout England and 15 million tweets from British football fans, Mousa and her colleagues found that after Salah joined Liverpool F.C., hate crimes in the Liverpool area dropped by 16% compared with a synthetic control. In addition, Liverpool F.C. fans halved their rates of posting anti-Muslim tweets relative to fans of other top-flight clubs. An original survey experiment suggests that the salience of Salah’s Muslim identity enabled positive feelings toward Salah to generalize to Muslims more broadly. Their findings provide support for the parasocial contact hypothesis—indicating that positive exposure to out-group celebrities can spark real-world behavioral changes in prejudice.

About the speaker

Salma Mousa is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Yale University. An Egyptian scholar of migration, conflict, and social cohesion, Salma typically partners with governments and NGOs in the Middle East and beyond to explore these questions. Her research has been published in Science and the American Political Science Review, and profiled by The Economist and PBS NOVA. She received her Ph.D. in political science from Stanford University in 2020, and her BSFS in International Politics from Georgetown University in Qatar.

CURA Workshop: Methodology and Bias: Reflections from Food Security Research in Ethiopia
2021-10-21 14:00 - 16:00 (Europe/Moscow) | Education City, Al Luqta St, Ar-Rayyan, Doha, Qatar
On October 21, 2021, CIRS hosted a CURA workshop titled, “Methodology and Bias: Reflections from Food Security Research in Ethiopia” led by Professor Logan Cochrane, Associate Professor in the College of Public Policy at Hamad Bin Khalifa University in Qatar. Via interactive exercises and group discussions, Cochrane guided thirteen GUQ and NUQ students to reflect on questions of power and their own positionality as researchers. One of the aims of the workshop was to demonstrate how food distribution and production is a politicized process that involves multiple actors with varying levels of decision-making power.

During the interactive group discussions, students were encouraged to think like policymakers and engage with datasets from the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organizations to identify which decisions such surveys would enable them to make. Cochrane explained how both food security scholars and practitioners agree that equitable, transparent, and rigorous research methods inform decisions. He underlined how qualitative methods can complement quantitative data and explained how to choose which method is more suitable according to the size and scope of a research project.

Drawing on examples from his research on food security amongst rural Ethiopian farmers, Cochrane demonstrated the strengths and limitations of survey research and proposed how new, community-centered methods are more suitable for studying the lived realities of local communities. He highlighted how local engagements and interactions enabled his research team to gain insight into how rainfall patterns, debt, and migration—factors often not discernable in macro-trends in quantitative research—impact local patterns and behaviors. While survey research studies macro-level trends, a community-centered approach zooms in on the lived realities of people, producing nuanced data and analysis. Specifically, a knowledge co-production approach through questions, conversations, and interactions at the community level helps discern hidden patterns and behaviors, providing valuable data to support development programs in rural areas. Cochrane demonstrated the importance of studying sub-national trends in order to understand and address local challenges.

“The session was extremely engaging – I felt involved throughout and it was unlike what I had expected. The material about knowledge co-production has really caught my attention. Its utilization in working together with local stakeholders to capture and produce novel and nuanced data seems to me as an interesting methodology which I am trying to learn more about.”
– Pragyan Acharya, class of 2024.

In conclusion, Cochrane argued that researchers are not apolitical and thus need to engage responsibly with local communities. He explained that the strength of community-centered methods is how it involves local actors as partners in co-producing knowledge. Ultimately, he argued, the key research question is determined by these interactions. Cochrane reminded students about bias and the need for research that is inclusive and comprehensive that, “When one does not ask certain questions, then that data becomes invisible.” This reinforces the significance of using the appropriate research method for a compelling research project.

Article by Khushboo Shah, senior at GUQ

It's Getting Hot in Here: Changing Climate Change
2021-11-21 12:45 - 13:45 (Europe/Moscow) | Education City, Al Luqta St, Ar-Rayyan, Doha, Qatar
On November 21, 2021, GU-Q students presented their research on international systems for managing global climate change at a hybrid CURA Lunch Talk titled, “It’s Getting Hot in Here: Changing Climate Change.” Six first-year students represented the group work of their classmates and covered topics on: the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), IPCC 6th assessment report, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and Council of the Parties (COPs), Qatar’s position on climate change management, and COP26.

The IPCC was described by Hind Al-Mohannadi (class of 2025) as the “Guardian of Climate Science.” As such, the IPCC produces assessment reports every five to eight years. The IPCC is a coalition of scientists and governments. The core scientists of the IPCC review all of the published climate science literature and produce assessment reports to highlight the areas of consensus in the science. They focus on studies that have a level of consensus of 99 percent or greater, which means the hypothesized outcome of a study is virtually certain. Maya Al-Kawari (class of 2025) presented the findings of the last IPCC assessment report (Assessment Report 6, Working Group I). She highlighted a statement of the report according to which it is “unequivocal that human influence has warmed the atmosphere, ocean and land.” She then showed a chart that illustrated the near linear relationship between the cumulative carbon dioxide emissions and global warming for five hypothetical carbon-emission scenarios until the year 2050. The chart shows that the global temperature will undoubtedly increase, it is only the temperature range that remains to be seen based on how effective actions to reduce carbon emissions are taken now (see figure 1 below).

Source: IPCC AR 6 Working Group 1

Another international body relating to climate change is the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). Samantha Facun (class of 2025) explained that this is a monitoring and reviewing group consisting of 197 parties, including all UN member states and the European Union (EU). The COP is an annual gathering of the parties in which they try to work towards joint agreements or protocols to address the impacts of climate change. For example, the Kyoto Protocol, adopted in 1997 and fully ratified in 2005 aimed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by five percent over five years. The Paris Agreement (2015) is another example of an outcome from a COP, in which signatories pledged to limit warming to no more than two degrees Celsius, with a preferred temperature of 1.5 degrees Celsius. Some parties form alliances to better lobby for their particular interests, for example, the Alliance of Small Island States, the High Ambition Coalition, and the Arab States. Unfortunately, data shows that the agreements that come out of COP meetings are very limited in their effectiveness (see figure 2 below).

Source: International Energy Agency

Moving further in to the view of Qatar in particular, Pei Ying Tsai (class of 2025) presented an overall picture of Qatar’s position toward the Paris Agreement and the Kyoto Protocol, to which Qatar is a signatory. Consistent with global trends, Qatar’s greenhouse emissions did not decrease after the Kyoto Protocol or Paris Agreement came into effect. Qatar, a small state, ranks number thirty-eight globally in amount of carbon dioxide emitted based on its territorial size. However, Qatar ranks number one globally in terms of carbon dioxide emissions per capita. On the positive side, relative to the rest of the GCC, Qatar’s climate debt (the debt owed by developed countries to developing countries for the damage caused by their disproportionately large contributions to climate change) has decreased significantly more than the other Gulf countries. In the recent COP26, Qatar pledged to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by twenty-five percent by 2030 – a mere nine years from now. It is planning to do this through significant actions taken in the areas of infrastructure and transport, water and waste management, and awareness.

Concluding the presentation, Angelo Castiello (class of 2025), highlighted the limitations of COP26 and the international systems for managing climate change. Climate change faces a notorious “free rider” problem, with poor commitment from the greatest emitters of greenhouse gases, which are also the richest countries. The COP delegates are countries, but also industries. Notably, the COP26 delegates associated with fossil fuel industries outnumbered the national delegations (see figure 3 below).

Source: Global Witness, BBC

The overall takeaway message from the event is that despite the international attention towards and efforts to assuage global warming and the impacts of climate change, international agreements and governmental proclamations are not going to be enough. We as individuals must make the collective decisions in our daily lives that have potential for lasting impact.

Article by: Elizabeth Wanucha, CIRS Operations Manager

Energy Aesthetics: New Directions in Studying the Cultural Life of Oil
2021-11-29 08:00 - 17:00 (Europe/Moscow) | Education City, Al Luqta St, Ar-Rayyan, Doha, Qatar
Speakers:

Anne Pasek, Assistant Professor in the Department of Cultural Studies and the School of the Environment at Trent University

Cajetan Iheka, Associate Professor of English at Yale University

Caren Irr, Professor of English at Brandeis University

Moderators:

Victoria Googasian, Assistant Professor at Georgetown University- Qatar.

Trish Kahle, Assistant Professor at Georgetown University- Qatar.

Firat Oruc, Assistant Professor at Georgetown University- Qatar.

Transcript

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Good evening and welcome to the CIRS panel discussion entitled “Everyday Energy: Approaches Delivered Experience.” My name is Ahmad Dallal, I’m the Dean of the Georgetown University Doha campus. This panel discussion is part of the CIRS, the Center for International and Regional Studies, newly formed research initiative on Energy Humanities, which is being led by three Georgetown University faculty members, professors, Victoria Googasian, assistant professor of American Literature at GUQ. Professor Trish Kahle, assistant professor of history at Georgetown University Qatar, and Professor Firat Oruc, assistant professor of world literature at Georgetown. Building on the previous research and scholarly record of CIRS, the thematic focus on environmental studies continues to address central questions related to climate change and other issues of environmental concern. Today’s Energy Humanities Initiative is a new project under the CIRS Environmental Studies’ thematic cluster that aims to generate new scholarly conversations on the importance of everyday energetic life to the study of energy’s past, present, and future. For today’s discussion, we are honored to have three scholars renowned for their work in the field of energy humanities. Professor Dominic Boyer, professor of anthropology and founding director of the Center for Energy and Environmental Research in the Human Science at Rice University. Professor Sara Pritchard, associate professor in the Department of Science and Technology Studies at Cornell University. And Professor Jennifer Wenzel, Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature and of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies at Columbia University. I graduated from that department. Just one little remark I was asked to mention that at the bottom of the screen, at the very right, that is an icon, which says CC, which will enable you to have a live transcript if you need to. So you could click on that icon to have a transcription of the lecture. Right now, without further ado, there is a very rich conversation ahead of us. I will hand over to Vicky to start the show, and welcome.

Hi, everyone, and welcome once again on behalf of myself and my co-organizers, Trish and Firat to this kickoff webinar for CIRS’s New Energy Humanities research initiative. I’m also just going to speak very briefly so we can get the show on the road and hand things over to our distinguished panelists. But I did want to just say a few words about the project. Very, very briefly before we get started. So we’ve conceived of this project as the title of the panel and the webinar suggests in response to what we perceived as a need to consider the lived experience of energy. And I want to explain what we mean by that phrase. Though, of course, we’re hoping that our panelists can help us think through it in greater depth as well. So here in the Gulf, I think it’s not surprising that scholarly approaches to energy have often been concerned with the sort of big picture issues of state security, political stability, global economic relations, that arise out of the production and consumption of energy. And this is really the zoomed-out view of energy, as it were. But our goal for this project is to use our position as humanists, as humanities scholars, to add just another layer of nuance and texture to that study of energy by bringing the scale of everyday life, everyday life of individuals and communities into focus. Which is not to say that we’re trying to reject or ignore the other scales at which states or economic systems and energy infrastructure operate. But we hope to connect these big structures that govern the flow of energy in our world to everyday experiences of ordinary people both in this region and beyond it. As you may know, the energy humanities is a rapidly expanding field of research, and we think that humanistic approaches are particularly well suited to answering these kinds of questions about the social and cultural dimensions of energy. We expect this panel to be the first in a series of conversations, so we’re inviting everyone here to keep an eye on the lovely new website that our colleagues at CIRS have put together for us, where you’ll find podcast episodes and other content forthcoming as the project continues to get to gather momentum. But tonight, we’re very pleased to be hosting this trio of experts whose work covers a wide range of fields, topics, geographical regions, all of whom have already made vital contributions to the study of lived experience of energy. And we’re excited to think with them about this topic tonight. So without further ado, I will hand things over to our first panelist, Dominic Boyer. Dr. Boyer, take it away, whenever you’re ready.

Thanks so much, Vicky. And thanks to all the organizers of this event. I think it’s really quite historically important, this initiative that you are that you’re developing. And I just feel humbled and honored to be a part of it. Thank you so much. So my background is in anthropology and especially in historical and political anthropology. And so, part of thinking about everyday energy for me is thinking about how we came to the kind of relationship to energy we have today, which, according to fellow historical anthropologist David Hughes, is one of energy without conscience. We use incredible amounts of energy, especially in the Global North, often without thinking very much about its consequences. So what I’d like to reconstruct in my few minutes here is a very brief glimpse of that bigger history. You see an image here which shows a kind of macrocosmic visualization of the United States energy system. Two things could strike you. One, how huge it is, 100 quadrillion BTUs worth of energy in one year flowing to the United States. And 80 percent of that is still fossil fuels. Only one percent is solar. So, you know, if we had started listening to scientists some 30 years ago, maybe that would be inverted. But the fact that it hasn’t suggests that these historical legacies are very important in terms of setting conditions of possibility for contemporary everyday energy experiences. And so that’s what I like to sort of highlight a little bit today. Now, I think that the history of modern energy, maybe counterintuitively actually begins in the European colonies, in the so-called new world, and particularly in the sugar and coffee plantations. This has been documented through a substantial amount of historical and political anthropology, that have looked at these relationships that, you know, the colonists came to the new world with the ambition to start growing things. And this precious commodity of sugar was one of their first ambitions. Columbus carried sugar cane clippings with him on his very first…his second voyage, rather. And as the conditions proved ecologically ripe for this kind of development in the 16th and 17th century, first the Portuguese and then the British and French created thousands of plantations across the Caribbean with the aim of exporting these precious commodities back to Europe. African slaves were brought in by the millions to power to offer the labor power for these plantations. And they were treated, as David Hughes argues, as a kind of fuel, as an expendable resource. They were literally worked to death in this process. And so for him, our relationship to energy today sort of begins in that lack of concern with human welfare in the plantation system, and with the fact that, as Kathryn Yusoff has put it, Europeans learned how to treat human beings as expendable and extractable energy properties through this experience. Now, sugar itself had a dramatic influence back in Europe. It transformed both middle-class and working-class diets. It helped create the industrial worker who could work longer, faster, harder than before, whose diet might still be poor. But having these stimulants always at the ready really helped. And indeed, to this day, we see the kind of emphasis on stimulants and labor connected to sort of capitalist modernity. So this changed over time, of course, but it changed in part because of the restriction of the slave trade. The abolition movements definitely deserve credit. But above all, it was the uprisings of slaves against the plantation system that were decisive. And in this respect, the Haitian revolution really deserves our attention as a geopolitical event that, in the specific sense, brought to an end France’s new world ambitions, led to the Louisiana Purchase, and the doubling in size of the United States, but also led to an increasing concern among those who operated plantations about what to do with this unruly labor force, and an interest in investing in machine labor as a way of replacing it. So, a lot of the innovations and machine labor that we credit as being associated with the industrial revolution begin to take shape within the plantation system first. Then those ideas come back to Europe. And there’s a wonderful book, a wonderful work of energy humanities by Cara Daggett called “The Birth of Energy,” that explains how in Victorian Britain you get a coming together of steam engine technology, imperial ambitions, new thermodynamic science and Presbyterian moral values that helped to redefine energy, which, up until then had been sort of a sense of dynamic virtue. It gets redefined and specified as being associated with work. Energy as work. And it’s work within a universe that seemed to be prone always to tending towards entropy, towards dissipation, towards waste. So human beings have to organize themselves to work even harder to make something of what the divine has bequeathed them. That leads, of course, to a tremendous investment in civilizational hierarchies and definitions that the Victorians are famous for. All arranged by capacities to use machines and to produce work and energetic racism, as Dagget describes it, that legitimates further imperial expansion and dispossession and that naturalizes fossil fuel use and wage labor as social necessities for human improvement, reinforcing the capitalist obsessions with work and growth. But of course, all of this is known already in the Caribbean. It doesn’t get invented in England. It really gets worked out in the new world. If you look at the old plantation manuals, you see how they already were conceiving of human beings as machines, of plantations, as machines, where they had to manage energy and productivity in very careful ways. Well, to bring this story a little bit closer out of the “sucro-political” into what I call the “carbo-political” era, with the spread of machines throughout Europe, comes an increasing need for the energy density of high carbon fuels. Wood will no longer do, and coal, by the end of the 19th century, becomes the dominant enabling fuel behind a European imperial modernity. And along with it, comes a sort of new regime of production and a new regime of commodities and consumption; what some have called the democracy of things, that suddenly, the “thingly” life around us becomes enriched and people demand and feel entitled to goods that they wouldn’t have had before this era. So the carbo-politics has a kind of dramatic shaping of what we think of as modern life and the affordance and luxuries that it involves. But as Timothy Mitchell tells the tale in his fabulous book, “Carbon Democracy,” there were limits to the sort of evolution of coal. And it really wasn’t about the pollution, which, we all know that burning coal is polluting and unpleasant, but it was less about that dimension of coal use that was problematic than the political, the labor politics of it. It takes a lot of people to mine coal and move it around. And those people have to go underground in dangerous conditions. And they become, they develop a sense of fraternity and identity and they start making demands, demands that we now call maybe, perhaps “social democratic” demands for labor rights and safe labor conditions. And, in fact, a lot of the the labor improvements that occur in the 20th century are owed, according to Mitchell, to the work of coal miners specifically. So he argues that in the post-World War Two redesign of the global economy, there’s a deliberate shift from coal to petroleum. Petroleum requires much less labor. It’s quite flexible in terms of how can be moved around the oceans via shipping and pipelines. And also it has these material properties that petrochemicals can produce plastics. A whole new regime of consumer goods becomes possible. And so the global modernity that typifies where we are now really takes shape in the middle of the 20th century, driven by petro-culture, driven by consumerism and again, cheap goods and rampant energy use without much regard for environmental and social consequences. So, it really just brings us to where we are today. And this is my last slide, hopefully on time, where, you know, the question that all of us are interested in is: what comes post-petro and how will that intersect? Given our topic here today with our everyday expectations, uses, ideologies, understandings of energy. Can we shift away from this model of energy as work? Do we have to shift towards something that Daggett calls “energy as freedom,” liberating energy from work? Do we have to shift our energy sources from the heavy reliance on petroleum and other high-density sources towards solarity? Which is something that a lot of people are talking about. How can that be achieved? What are the cultural forms that will come along with a solar revolution? These are things that I think we’re going to talk about in the discussion to come, so I’ll just stop there. Thank you.

Thanks so much for that history, as you kick us off, and for those questions. And I do think we will come back to you. I just want to remind our attendees that you can post questions at anytime, using Q&A button at the bottom of the screen. And we will have time to get to those questions at the end of tonight’s webinar. So now I will go ahead and hand things off to our second panelist, Sara Pritchard. So, Dr. Pritchard, the floor is yours.

Yes, I think I know how to do this after all this time with Zoom, sorry. This was working a minute ago. Hopefully this is working now. OK. Can you see this? Is this working now? Great. Thank you. So I’m delighted to be here and thank you for the invitation and honor of being part of this launching event. It is an exciting and important initiative. Very briefly, as some of you know, my areas of interest include environmental history, the history of technology, and environmental science studies. So, most broadly, I’m interested in the relationships between, and dynamics among, people, the environment, and technology in the past, but also with an eye to the present and the future. First off, as a historian, I very much appreciate the roundtable’s and thematic project’s interest in everyday energy and lived experience for a number of reasons influenced by social history, labor history, and other subfields. These themes encourage us to think about energy not just from elite perspectives, political, economic, and intellectual elites, but they push us to consider a much wider range of historical and also contemporary actors. This is sometimes called a bottom-up history versus top-down history. These themes also call attention to race, ethnicity, class, gender, religion, and other categories and historical processes such as colonialism, which all can shape experiences with, and ideas about, energy. If we put these very broad concerns in conversation with energy specifically, I think we can consider the experiences and voices of energy workers, users, consumers, mediators, as well as of non-users, those who opt out, but particularly those who are outside dominant energy systems or made outside these systems. Overall, everyday energy and lived experience encourages us to engage with a much wider set of actors, consider the role of agency of these groups. They nuance our understanding beyond simplistic generalizations, and they open up conversations and windows onto contestation and debate. All are really important. Now, as I was reviewing the prompt and trying to collect my thoughts and comments, I have to admit that I kept finding myself sliding back into energy systems and infrastructures and regimes, which in many ways is the opposite of this initiative. So my comments here, and I think there’s synergies with Dominic’s presentation, focus on the intersections of these issues. I want to think a little bit about how energy systems or these higher-level analyses certainly shape and limit, quote-unquote, everyday energy without being either deterministic or outside historical change. But at the same time, how a more social history approach to energy infrastructure and regimes yield important insights about the limits and constraints of these systems. So I want to make five brief points. When we think about technological systems, especially so-called high-tech systems, I think it’s really easy to focus on the technological stuff because systems are by definition large scale and are composed of many constituent parts. So if we think about nuclear reactors to produce energy, we might think about uranium fuel rods, cooling towers, power lines, and so forth. But as historians of technology and others have shown, large-scale systems also depend on workers, not just experts, designers, and engineers, but operators, technicians, and other everyday workers. Often these workers become more visible, or quite visible, during crises, such as the operators who desperately tried to manage the reactors at Fukushima in the hopes of preventing meltdown, which didn’t happen. Or in February of this year, an unusually cold winter storm settled across Texas and much of the American South, and utility operators initially initiated what were intended to be rolling blackouts to prevent a catastrophic failure of the grid. Workers also contend with crises and emergencies and their complex aftermaths, often at considerable risks to themselves. So here we might think of Fukushima’s eighteen thousand cleanup workers. The large point I want to make here is that workers are really essential to high-tech energy systems and, therefore, consumers’ ability to use energy. Workers have particular lived experiences with energy and energy systems as laborers, and consumers and users ultimately rely on energy workers’ knowledge, skill, and labor. The second point I want to make is that, in some parts of the world—and I think we have to be careful about generalizations— energy systems are certain forms of energy and their associate systems have become so, so normal and systematized that they basically become invisible or taken for granted. Electricity is a good example here, say, in Europe and North America. Several scholars have analyzed how energy production and consumption is increasingly separated both spatially and socially. So many of us are fortunate to just be able to flip a switch to turn on electric lights rather than spending days and weeks making candles for winter. But as scholars of infrastructure have argued, infrastructure becomes so normalized, it becomes an invisible, assumed backdrop—until it fails. So the point I want to highlight here is that normal accidents—to borrow the phrase from Perrow—disasters really, so-called disasters, and failure, put everyday dependency on energy and energy systems into sharper relief. However, scholars have also shown how it takes concerted work and effort to normalize and institutionalize energy systems. For instance, Chris Jones has discussed how people had to be taught how to use and burn anthracite coal in the domestic sphere. It wasn’t self-evident. And he has these wonderful multipage manuals teaching servants for wealthy East Coast families basically how you put anthracite coal in stoves. I love this example for a couple of reasons. For one, that it highlights domestic workers and their labor generally, but particularly their labor around energy specifically. Yet another example, electrification was much slower and funkier than confident proclamations by inventors, utilities, and promoters at the time suggest. So we need to look at rhetoric versus reality. And what I want to highlight here is how energy systems and infrastructure are neither inevitable nor permanent. They take work. In my view, one of the most important issues is the uneven or unequal distribution of social and environmental costs, risks, and vulnerabilities associated with energy infrastructure and regimes, both during normal operations and crises. For many marginalized groups, this is a defining feature of energy as lived experience. So to give two examples from colleagues: Andrew Needham has shown how dramatic demographic growth and suburbanization in the US Southwest, where it’s very hot, depended on a lot of energy in part to support centralized air conditioning. Yet the so-called livability of these suburbs relied on coal-fueled electricity. Electricity produced on Diné or Navajo lands And it was these communities who experienced the disproportionate environmental and health effects of coal-fired plants. Or we could look at an example from atomic energy workers, Gabrielle Hecht, who’s looked at uranium mining in Africa and the short-term and long-term hazards nuclear workers faced through exposure, even though they weren’t seen as part of the nuclear age or nuclear world, that at times, this extended into families and communities with radioactive clothing or using scrap metal from mines to make shacks or other buildings. So my take-off point here is I think, frankly, it’s irresponsible to analyze energy systems and energy without attending to social and environmental justice. Quickly, my fifth point: energy systems are obviously dependent on organic and or inorganic energy sources, but these systems are always located in environmental contexts that both shape and are shaped by those systems. And this is encapsulated by the concept of an “envirotech” subfield in the history of technology and environmental history. And we can certainly hear considerable lived experiences of both humans and non-humans in these energy landscapes. Certainly, hydroelectricity is probably one of the most obvious cases here. So I’d like to highlight that this complete separation of environment and technology is an erroneous and even dangerous ideal. So to quickly close as we are now in year two of the pandemic, I want to acknowledge the vital energy of human labor, particularly essential workers and caregivers in these extraordinary times, but also, as Gabrielle Hecht calls it, extraordinary times that have revealed and deepened existing problems and inequalities both nationally and globally. And I look forward to our conversation.

Thanks so much for those remarks and those points that we’ll bear in mind moving forward tonight. So finally, I’d like to hand things over to Jennifer Wenzel, who will close out our panelists’ opening remarks. So, Dr. Wenzel, take it away.

Thank you very much. And I’d like to add my thanks to the organizers. It’s such an honor to participate in this inaugural event. And I’m particularly enthusiastic about the specific focus you’ve chosen for your energy humanities initiative: the theme of everyday energy. To me, the central idea of the energy humanities is that neither climate change nor the various economic and environmental challenges associated with fossil fuels are merely engineering problems. Rather, are political problems, narrative problems, and ultimately problems of the imagination. My own expertise is in narrative, not just literary narratives, but also the implicit unspoken narratives that shape cultural imagining and everyday experience and how we think about, or more importantly, don’t think about, issues like oil and fossil fuels. This is the idea of normalization that Sarah was just talking about. For many people who are fortunate enough to inhabit what the Niger Delta poet Ogaga Ifowodo calls the “chain or ease” enabled by fossil fuels, the primary mode of thinking about energy is not having to think about it. In this fossil-fueled cultural imaginary, oil is at once everywhere and nowhere. Indispensible, yet largely on apprehended, not so much invisible, as unseen. And I borrow this line from my introduction to “Fueling Culture.” I’m bringing my screen up now. My introduction to this book, Fueling Culture, which is a compendium of keywords on the intersections between energy and culture that I coedited with Imre Szeman and Patricia Yaeger, and Dominic has a piece in this collection. One of the key concepts in Energy Humanities is “impasse,” the predicament that Imre Szeman has described as knowing where we stand with regard to environment and energy, but being unable to take action at a scale adequate to the situation. Impasse is a problem for politics. But I’d argue that it’s also connected to esthetics, by which I mean ways of seeing and sensing how we learn to see or not to see. How we learn to regard some things as ugly and other things as beautiful. Think wind turbines. The future might hinge on whether we can convince people that wind turbines are beautiful, solar panels as well. How we learn to regard some things as pleasurable or desirable. These questions of pleasure and desire are central to the question of everyday energy. No matter what we think about oil, every one of us derives some kind of pleasure from the world that fossil fuels have built, including the ways that our own bodies interact with and are shaped by the world around us. It’s not that we love oil itself, which is, after all, kind of smelly and sticky, but that we all have some embodied attachment to the things that oil makes possible. I hear air conditioning is pretty important to a number of the hosts of this event. So for some people, this sense of embodied petro-pleasure comes from the smoothness and sheen of plastic. For me, the smell of my dad’s butane lighter, when I was a kid. I’ve even written an essay on how I love to fly. I think I remember it vaguely, how I love to fly. Of course, it’s not the indignities of post 9/11 commercial air travel that I love, but rather the thrill of exhilaration when the pilot hits the gas and my body is jolted back in the seat. I love the technological sublime of an active airfield, the many kinds of labor that bring a plane from the sky to the gate, and the sea of twinkling blue lights on an airport runway at night. I first described my love of flying for the students in my class on literature and oil. I asked the students to write what I call an “oil inventory,” a creative, open-ended assignment in which they make an inventory. In other words, a list or an accounting of the significance and presence of oil in their lives. Some describe their relationship to oil over the course of a single day. Some wrote a biography of their oil lives so far. I came up with the idea of the oil inventory, when I read this passage from Edward Said’s introduction to Orientalism, where he writes: “The starting point of critical elaboration is the consciousness of what one really is, and is ‘knowing thyself’ as a product of the historical process to date, which is deposited in you an infinity of traces, without leaving an inventory… Therefore it is imperative at the outset to compile such an inventory.” And I love the kind of sedimentary imagery of history depositing these traces in you. So the fundamental gesture of the oil inventory is this active process of knowing oneself in relationship to fossil fuels. Here’s my own academic biography in the form of an oil inventory. So the oil inventory challenges students— and I should say that I wrote this academic bio on a dare from Stephanie LeMenager, another wonderful scholar of energy humanities. So the oil inventory challenges students to acknowledge their love for some part of the world that oil has made—something they would not want to lose. Rather than focusing only on guilt, shame, or fear, which don’t seem a promising way to break through impasse and to lean toward transition. Such negative emotions can lead to a gesture that’s all too easy of pointing out energy hypocracy, whether one’s own or others. As if anyone who drives or flies or eats food comes from a factory gives up the right to wonder and worry about fossil fuels. We are oil subjects who inhabit a society built upon fossil fuels. That’s the big picture the oil inventory invites students to glimpse. But one of the less encouraging lessons that I take from the historical work of scholars like Matt Huber is that the oil inventory was actually invented by the oil industry. And here’s one example of Huber’s argument about advertising campaigns launched by U.S. oil companies dating back to the 1940s that explicitly invite consumers to consider the indispensability of petroleum products in their lives. So I think here we see some of the ideological and imaginary work of normalization. Look, there’s oil in your food. Isn’t that great? Don’t worry about it. And I would say that the same strategy is at work in this recent ad campaign by Exxon Mobil, which is called Energy Lives Here. And I’m going to play an ad from this campaign, which is fortuitously enough called Enabling Everyday Progress. And I’ve Lost. Here it goes. I’m going to go ahead. I’m not totally sure the audio is going to come through. You don’t need to think about the energy that makes our lives possible. Because we do. We’re Exxon Mobile and powering the world responsibly is our job. Because boiling an egg isn’t as simple as just boiling an egg. Life takes energy. Energy and lives here. So ad this offers a perfect example of Huber’s argument that the energy industry in North America creates knowledge and awareness of consumers’ dependence on energy precisely in order to ensure passivity. Right. It’s not that they don’t want us to know about energy. They want us to know that we need it. So notice how the ad invites viewers to forget the revelations offered by the ad’s visual mapping of all that is involved in boiling an egg. So we hear “you don’t need to think about the energy that makes our lives possible because we do.” So the lesson that I draw here is that critical studies of energy in the Energy Humanities must reclaim the oil inventory from the oil industry in order to disrupt the settled habits of mind that surround the energy regimes of the present. Thus, the need for oil inventories of a more complete and complex kind than those that Exxon Mobil are offering. But this task is made harder by the fact that capitalism understands the workings of desire and the imagination better than we would like. Thus, the need for critical investigations of everyday energy. Thank you.

Thank you so much to all of our speakers for those really wonderful opening remarks. Now we’re going to move into a section that will offer some questions and hopefully get a discussion going. Among them, please do feel free to respond directly to each other as well as to the questions. And I’m also going to try and incorporate some of your remarks into the questions as we go. And so the first is to really think about method by trying to and — I’m sorry that my cat just decided that this was the time she was going to come and try and bother me. So we’ll see if she cuts off. But in any case, how your discipline, in particular, understands the concept of lived experience, because I was really struck in your talks by some of the different ideas that came through, the ideas about social revolution, about work, about sensory life. And so I’m just going to offer that as perhaps a starting point to thinking about that, that particular ways that you approached lived experience in your disciplines. Whoever would like to start off.

Well, I guess I could start. I mean, I think that anthropology, really the premise of anthropology, is the study of lived experienced in its many, many complexities. So I would say for us at least, this is very familiar territory. But what makes it unusual — just many thanks to my co-panelists, Sara and Jennifer, for these amazing opening remarks — they showed how many layers there are to thinking about energy. You need to think about the forms of knowledge involved, the forms of desire, the institutions, the infrastructures. So I think that it’s not even, I mean, lived experience captures a lot. And I think as we want to explore it, we have to think about what are the strategies for maybe revealing some of the habits we have that are so ingrained and so under-analyzed in some ways that we don’t even think about it. I do agree with what Jennifer said, that that’s kind of the premise of the Energy Humanities is to take what’s invisible and to sort of flip it over and to try to turn it on its back and look at all that’s there. Is there anything other panelists would like to add on? Well, I was trying to. Oh, look, we’re unmuting at the same time. I think that the kind of the go-to answer for this from the perspective of literary studies — and I should say that I’m a student of narrative.

Right. And so someone who works on poetry might object to my answer. But I would say that I think that the general assumption is that it’s realist fiction that is the genre that is meant to capture whatever it is meant by lived experience, whether psychological realism or social realisms, a narrative that gives the effect of real life. But to echo what Dominic said, I don’t think that it has been the case all the time. I wouldn’t say that it is only in the past decade or so that literary scholars, anthropologists, et cetera, are becoming cognizant of energy. But I do think what Sarah said about crisis, bringing the indispensability of labor and infrastructure into visibility has a corollary effect in literary studies. But I think what has passed for realism may well have included plenty of details that tell us about energy, but we have tended not to notice them. Right. And so I think that even what counts as realism is up for grabs in terms of the extent to which we grapple with the indispensability of energy and the unevenness of energy. My colleague Imre Szeman has a kind of wonderful phrase for talking about this, which is “fictions of surplus,” which he uses to describe both the historical fiction that the surplus of energy that has been made possible by fossil fuels over the past two centuries is anything but an unrepeatable historical anomaly. But the literary aspect of fiction of surplus is that literary fiction has not done anything to challenge that kind of fiction and bring it into visibility. I guess I’ll just out a couple of small things. I think I alluded to this a bit in my comments. And first, as a sidebar, I’m just intrigued and love the synergy’s across our three comments, which were entirely uncoordinated. But it’s amazing how there’s lots of ping-ponging and productive in generative ways. Thank you.

I alluded a little bit to social history really accessing lived experience and in important ways versus top-down history and also hinted at rhetoric versus reality in terms of thinking about what sources that we use, which voices we access and Jennifer’s presentation, talking about ads and idealized representations versus what things look like on the ground for different groups. So I think those are two important points just to draw those out again. But also one of the things that I’ve been thinking about is the “we.” I mean we’ve been using “we,” our actors use “we” and really starting to challenge and pull that apart. And also the political-strategic use of “we” in order to evade politics or keep power in the institutions and groups that already have them. So I think that asking questions about the “we” and generalizations that helps us get lived experience, but precisely looking at lived experience and everyday energy helps us problematize the “we” historically, contemporaneously, ethnographically in terms of policy, all those kinds of things in some really important ways. Yeah, I think this really connects to some of your recent work for all of our panelists, which have really drawn out these key concepts or metaphors. And I think we also saw some new ones tonight with the ideas of impasse, visibility, the idea of the non-user. But some of the ones from your recent work: the concept of solarity, the idea of an endscape, or the concept of extractivism. And I think given what you’ve all just said, it would be interesting to maybe reflect on the utility of these big ideas for organizing these really diverse ranges of lived experience, as well as to sort of think about the way they allow us an entry point into diverse forms of everyday life that we otherwise might not see.

Can I do that annoying political debate thing of answering my panelists, ignoring the question momentarily, and then getting to the question? Yeah. I mean, I think that Sara’s point about the “we” is incredibly important. And I also saw, I think maybe a question from Jeff Insko, which I feel is kind of maybe getting to this as well. And I can say that my own training from graduate school as a scholar of post-colonial literatures, specializing in Anglophone literatures of Africa and South Asia, has really…the way I think about the specialty of my work has changed entirely as I have begun working more on energy humanities. Right. So it’s Nigeria that got me into thinking about oil to begin with. But it has become almost impossible to ignore my own institutional location in North America, which is also the kind of it’s the center of gravity of well, I might get some pushback in this audience. But I tend to think of it as the center of gravity of the fossil fuel industry and also the center of gravity of the energy humanities. And so I think my work has become increasingly contrapuntal between the United States and places where I had been trained in graduate school to think about. Right. So the Mississippi Delta to the to the Niger Delta. And I think that’s all about not necessarily abjuring or disavowing the “we,” but thinking about the different textures of different kinds of we. Right. And another thing that I would say is that I don’t think it’s enough to say North America or the United States. And my thinking in energy humanities has been really shaped by two kinds of locations. One is the classroom. And I am in what now passes from my classroom, right in my home. But one is the classroom. And I think that that is very much the site of thinking about the we of a class and how it connects to these other spaces. And the other is my former institutional location at The University of Michigan, which was about forty-five minutes drive from Detroit. And so I think my students in Michigan had a very different understanding of what it means to think about oil and energy than my students in New York. And I started thinking about energy, you know, in the kind of downturn after the bankruptcy of Detroit. And so I think my students had a sense of a different kind of petro-violence than the petro-violence that I thought I was teaching them about, about the Niger Delta. I will now — sorry Trish, to have ignored your question — I will now take it up. And I would answer just very quickly. And I think that you’ve asked me to talk about extractivism. And the very quick thing that I would say about that is that if anything, I understand myself at this particular moment, as I’m not sure anti-extractivism. — and by that, like, of course, we’re all anti-extractivism — but what I mean by that specifically is suspicious of that category as a category of analysis, because I perceive in it a kind of conceptual creep where it’s it’s becoming a synonym for capitalism writ large. Right. And so losing the texture of what I had understood that word to mean. And here again, I’m cribbing from a piece that I co-wrote with Imre Szeman over the summer. And I think my favorite part of that piece is footnotes six or something like that, which I wrote to claim what had been commons, but would ask whether a dam is extractivist in the same way as a coal mine. And I don’t think that it is, even if we can think about all of the kind of harms and costs that dams inflict on on communities. To me, there’s a value in holding onto a particular kind of materiality in the concept of extractive, which I feel is being how do you say, metaphorized? Turned into a metaphor, in all kinds of directions. But I appreciate the question. Sorry for going on.

Thanks, Jennifer. I guess I could jump in and talk a little bit, speak to the sort of the concepts, in particular solarity as a concept that I think a lot of people are beginning to think with in the energy humanities as a kind of an opposite from petro-culture or something. We’re not quite sure. And, you know, I guess I would tell the parable of one of the early critical theorists in our European intellectual heritage, Karl Marx, who famously never really defined what, you know, a post-capitalist society was supposed to look like communism for him was the negation of the capitalist society of his era. It wasn’t the sort of newly formed, fully formed world that was supposed to follow it. And that’s caused a lot of confusion. And then a lot of people pointed and said, you know, you’re a lazy thinker, an incomplete thinker for this reason. But he was a Hegelian, and Hegelians don’t believe you can really understand things until you’re living in an experientially saturated way through them. So. what I would say about solarity is I don’t think we know what the post-petrol world is going to look like exactly I think what we can do, though, is we can both, on the one hand, think about the values that should inform that world. And we can also think about the kinds of acts of de-systematization of petro-culture that we can all participate in. What I call sabotage. I mean, the acts of sabotage that could be riding a bike instead of, you know, driving a car or flying less or demanding that your political representatives support decarbonization measures. There are a lot of ways you can participate through direct action or indirect action in that process. And I think that as a solarity comes, and we’ve seen this throughout time, many times, again, that something seems impossible to imagine until suddenly it’s there. And then you’re like, oh, of course, we should have known all along that this is what it was. And I think that one of the things I would say, and I’m saying this from a place of Houston, I’m saying it from the beating heart of petro-culture to you — is that the fossil fuel economy will end faster than we think. It’s already decisively on its way out. And in 20 years, we might be amazed to look back and say we didn’t see how fast it was going to end. So solarity is coming in some form or another. But I think to speak to the environmental justice question that was raised in Jeff’s question in the Q&A, that is the key issue: how not to fall into the grooves of the extractivism of the past, how not to build wind parks and solar farms in ways that dispossess people that don’t have. Create meaningful connections to landscapes and communities that prioritize the interests of global capital over the needs of people who live near to these installations. Those are the sorts of habits that we can actually have to work on to unmake so that we don’t end up creating a sort of solarized dystopia going forward. And that’s something that I think is or is a legitimate fear. I guess I’ll comment briefly on the concept that you alluded to Trish in terms of… I had this extraordinary once-in-a-lifetime trip to a small bard in Norway north of the Arctic Circle in January 2019 which seems like a billion years ago now, particularly given travel and pandemic and everything, during Polar Night. So it’s January during Polar Night. And I wrote a piece about the experience of being there and what it was like and thinking about energy and the landscapes of energy north of the Arctic Circle. And so I was playing with the concept of “endscape,” which builds on Dolly Jørgensen’s concept of “endling.” With “endling” being the last the last animal of the species that’s about to go extinct. So I was playing with the idea of endscape, of landscapes that are on the cusp of disappearance or are on their way out. Which, obviously, the Arctic is ground zero for that. And part of the point of the piece was also thinking explicitly and making visible my own implication in that very process at Svalbard. Right. Because I flew a gazillion miles and it took three days to get there and all this kind of stuff, as well as the other people who are part of this conference on darkness. I think I guess what I want to… there are two things I want to say about that that are related is, that “endscape” can be a very privileged category in terms of the futurity of landscape, rather than thinking about how many places are already endscapes or were endscapes 10 years ago or more. Right. And so anxieties about sea-level rise, say, on the coast of the United States versus islands or other parts of the world, which are already experiencing extensive change. And wrestling with the social and economic and political implications of that and so forth. So I haven’t really played with or developed this concept more. But I think what one of the things that’s important to me is to not take for granted that many people, particularly vulnerable people in North America and around around the world, are already living in endscapes, so to speak, and not imagine this is something that’s in the future, whether in your future, or just in the future. I think all of these comments and this sort of first chunk have really underscored something you had said earlier, Sara, right. Which was, you know, getting at this idea that the everyday can really give us strong insights into really profound questions about justice and ensuring justice. And so I want to invite our participants…our attendees, rather, to go ahead and begin sending in questions. I’m going to sort of shift to another round of questions. But we are going to open it to the audience very soon. And that will be great to have a good list of questions to start from. And so now I want to sort of talk explicitly about something that I think has come up in all of the answers, but to really come directly to this problem of futurity. And I think, you know, just taking a little bit of a shift, I was wondering if we could think about even just the idea of lived experience beyond the human right, so theorizing the lived experience as opposed to anthropocentric category, how we might conceive lived experience to include non-human forms of experience as well as human. And so that might be obviously the energy realities of the present as well as future modes of relationality with non-humans. I guess I could jump in on this. It’s a great prompt. Thanks so much Trish.

It reminds me a bit of one of my favorite energy humanities projects, environmental humanities projects that I’ve done in my life, which was working together with collaborators in Iceland and my partner Cymene Howe to create the world’s first memorial for a glacier lost in Iceland to climate change. The first of Iceland’s major glaciers to disappear to climate change. And we had a lot of interesting discussions talking about how do you mourn something that… How do you mourn the death of something that was never properly speaking alive? And how do you blend together sort of the the deep human traditions of thinking about Earth beings and their existence in places? And glaciers in Iceland have meant many different things in different times. And how do you acknowledge that alongside, accommodate it to human ritual and human understandings of death? And I’ll say that that whole process was incredibly, you know, powerful for me and really made me think a lot about how at least in terms of the losses that we’re experiencing, we have to be more present for them and we have to create communities of mourning around the changing world, the damaged planet that we inhabit now. And I actually think that the experience of attending to and really thinking about, say, the loss of a glacier is like something like the loss of a friend or some kin. It’s something that actually, I think has the potential to make us more engaged in the process of making sure that all the glaciers don’t go in the same way. So I do think that attention to the non-human, the anthropocentrism is very deeply set in us, especially in the north, in terms of thinking about, you know, how we relate to the world. But that’s something that we really have to try to disable as we move forward or try to find other ways of being human. I’ll say as an anthropologist, you know, the kind of European modernity that I was discussing in my presentation is pretty much a huge outlier to the rest of human cultures across time in terms of its, you know, its contempt for nature, its contempt for other species, frankly. And I think that’s something that, again, suggests that where we’re going is not simply just tweaking the existing system by putting up some solar panels and wind turbines, but we actually have to engage in a process of civilizational transformation at a more fundamental level. And that’s something that’s frightening. But also, when you think about it, very exciting, because this civilization has a lot of blood in its on its hands, if you will. And I think there’s a chance to make something better. I can jump in. I think there’s a synergy between what you just raised and something that I wanted to bring up kind of as a sidebar. There’s the classic question and history of science and particularly science studies about voice and representation or spokesperson and questions about who speaks for the non-human. Do scientists speak? What does that mean, particularly given that we know the ways in which science and scientists are shaped by cultural, historical, and other kinds of contexts. But that’s kind of a sidebar. What you’re just saying, I think about cultural abnormality of the West. That’s my exaggeration, exaggerated summary of what you just said. I was just thinking about the ways in which this question, which I really appreciate, is already predicated on certain assumptions and places and cultures and contexts. And I’m thinking about the ways in which this question wouldn’t make sense for many indigenous communities. And so what does it mean to be reflective, even about these categories like living, non-living, human, non-human. The question of kin and who are what counts as kin. And certainly there’s been a lot of work in environmental humanities about this, but also some debate between it and digital scholars and environmental humanists in terms of what does it mean to appropriate indigenous notions of kin to describe more complex relationships between the human and non-human and the more than human. So by way of response or engagement with this really important question, I actually just want to encourage us to think about the ways in which it’s already culturally defined in particular ways, and that that of itself, I think is important. Sorry. Yeah, I think I appreciate what Dominic was saying about a sense of loss. And I think that the words that resonate for me in this question are “relationality,” or the word is is “relationality” rather than “experience.” And perhaps, for the moment, I want to locate myself within a kind of European mindset in order to say that I am not confident that I can theorize non-human experience. Right. And I’m thinking partly with Dipesh Chakrabarty, who says that actually we humans can’t experience ourselves as a species. Right. And so relationality is therefore the word that really kind of that resonates for me in terms of understanding our relationship to energy as a multi or understanding relationships to energy as multi-species relationships. And maybe I’ll see if I can share my screen for a literary example that comes at this question in a different way. This is, I think, if I’m not mistaken, this is the very end of Italo Calvino’s story, The Petrol Pump, which is ostensibly a story about pumping gas, like pumping gas during the 1970’s oil shock. The first one in Italy. But as this protagonist is pumping gas, what he is imagining is, as you can read, the day in the future, when “the earth’s crust reabsorbs the cities, this plankton sediment that was humankind will be covered by geological layers of asphalt and cement until in millions of years’ time it thickens into oily deposits, on whose behalf we do not know.” And what I so love about this passage in the story is that it takes the geological fact of fossil fuels as tiny dead creatures, right, fossil fuels as fossilized life, and imagines a future in which humans become fossil fuels for another life form. Right. And so it uses the resources of fiction to imagine what a future human relationship to fuel as fuel might look like on behalf of another species.

Thank you all so much. That was really reminiscent, actually, of my environmental history students working through Bathsheba Demuth’s “Floating Coast,” this year. And just its a really wonderful and provocative discussion to have. So before we move over to audience questions, I’ll just pose one question, bring it all back around and let you give some, I guess, wrap-up comments before we move to the audience questions, which is just to think about really explicitly what role the study of history and culture can play in bringing about a just energy transition. I know we’ve already reflected on this quite a bit, but.

Okay, I can get started here. I can speak really specifically to the risk research that Cymene and I did on wind-power development in southern Mexico, the densest concentration of onshore wind parks anywhere in the world, primarily built upon ancestral indigenous lands of the binnizá and ikojts peoples. And without, you know, getting into the weeds on this too much, just to say that it’s been incredibly impressive in terms of just decarbonizing electricity, it’s been impressive from that standpoint. It’s a terrific development of over two gigawatts of clean electricity. So from that perspective, very impressive. But it’s also been extremely politically contentious, in part because the people who developed these projects had no understanding whatsoever of the specific history of this region, of the indigenous cultures there and of their long relationship to various extractivist projects in the past. So even if you’re only thinking of this from a pragmatic point of view of how can you create clean energy projects that people don’t hate? History and culture have an enormous role to play in this, as we found. And that’s simply, you know, trying to engage these communities in a serious way and understand where they’re coming from would have gone a long way towards creating trust and goodwill. And just to speak to Jennifer’s point about relationality. It’s all about relationality. This is all about trying to be in good relation to other beings, human beings, to human beings, us, to us as a species, to the ecologies that sustain us, and so forth. And I think history and culture are not perfect, but just the commitment to trying to understand, to try to communicate, to try to empathize with peoples and other beings with different histories, I think is really valuable in terms of getting out of the habit in which we’re trying to dominate the world. Right. Extract its resources and use it to feed our machines of productivity and prosperity. Because we’ve seen where that is going to go, and it’s going to go to ecocide and ultimately to the collapse of the civilization. And so it’s all too clear that we’re on that path. So I think that history and culture actually are incredibly important valuable lessons in information and ethics to offer us in that struggle to not allow that future to be foretold. I can go next, I guess. I mean, I’m thinking with my fellow panelists in terms of things that have already been said, and I think that, you know, the kind of classic transition from plantations to petroleum in the U.S. Gulf Coast is, you know, it kind of haunts my understanding of history, of energy transitions. And so what that tells us. And again, I’m stuck with Jeff Insko’s question on my screen. Right. So what that tells us is that the past is not past. Right. And Sara Pritchard has also invoked the really important idea that for so many people, a future of less energy or the costs of the current energy regime is already here. Right. And has been here for a long time. So the past is not past. The future is already here. And so I think I’m leaning actually more to the history than the culture part of the question. I think that the question of how one frames a narrative, how one frames a narrative of history, and how one tells the story of how we got here and who counts in that “we” is crucial to what transition looks like in the future. And so an idea that has stuck with me since I first read it is from the Nigerian writer and public intellectual Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie who says that what is important, or the narrative mode that entrenches injustice is starting the narrative from “secondly.” Right. And what she means by that is you begin the narrative when the violence has already happened and is normalized. Right. And so to refuse a historical narrative that begins from “secondly,” that begins with the violence already baked in, I think by analogy, I think it helps to chart a way toward a future where those modes of violence are not always already assumed. It’s hard to figure out how to add and build on to those great comments. So much has already been said. I think one thing I would add is the way many humanists are attentive to power. This is a super simple point and comment. But sometimes simple matters. Multiple forms of power in different kinds of contexts and different kinds of ways, but understanding how that works historically, culturally, and so forth, then helps us have a richer understanding when we’re debating the contemporary moment. I was kind of twitch about the lessons of history. I mean, yes, there are lessons of history. But then also, you know, I think all historians are trained to twitch at that. But I think if we have a much richer, deeper understanding of these layers and sediments of structures and power and violence and also opportunities and resistance, there are spaces there for thinking both creatively and pragmatically, to kind of link my two co-panelists’ comments.

Well, thank you so much again for talking through these ideas. I have so many more questions that I could ask. But I’m going to turn it now over to my colleague Firat to go ahead and moderate the discussion with our audience questions. Thanks Trish. And thanks to our panelists for the really remarkable reflections that they have provided us. And of course, as a price comes questions. I would like to start with one question I think related to our current moment of the pandemic and also related to one question we had in mind. This is from my Education City colleague Peter Martin. How does or might energy humanities engage or position the notion of well-being and thinking of Dominic’s concept of rebellion, Sara’s evident enjoyment of dog sledding and other experiences of Arctic darkness, Jennifer’s reading fiction, watching films for the planet. What is the value of playfulness and games for the energy humanities? So that’s the fun part in certain ways, right? We could see our interest in lived experiences that turn away from the high seriousness of global energy politics. Is there a political value in that affective shift and make us feel better?

I could start us off here, I mean, I think Jennifer has already talked about the importance of narratives and counter-narratives and creativity and imagination and the ways in which that can all be motivating or constraining. I think some of this affective shift when I was thinking about this question, for me, I think it helps us get out of declensions narratives or nihilistic narratives, even if we — again, asterisk, who’s the “we” here — We are facing daunting circumstances in many ways that this affective shift may provide more motivation or creativity in terms of creative responses to various challenges versus a threat of inaction. I think there’s the line about “if the ship’s sinking, let’s just party as the Titanic goes down.” Right. And the other thing that I was thinking about is actually going back to William Cronon’s “The Trouble with Wilderness” article. He has this line about there’s a problem with seeing all human use as abuse because it doesn’t…it fails to differentiate between different kinds of anthropocentric engagements with the natural world or non-human or more than human world or worlds. And therefore, it becomes a simplistic binary. If we act or change, that’s bad. Untouched wilderness supposedly is good, except that never existed anyway. So I think this more playful register — also, I was thinking about Holly Jean Buck’s idea of the “Charming Anthropocene” — that maybe it provides greater motivation for people rather than feeling overwhelmed, or the scale of issues is fundamentally not changeable or inactionable…unactionable? I don’t know, whatever. Maybe I can pick up on Sara’s last point. Sara, thanks so much. And this idea of sort of feeling trapped in the condition, you know, watching the train in slow motion, you know, collide with the car and not being able to feel like you have any agency to change things. And I do think that goes back to some of the earlier comments that we had about, you know, about can sort of sense of impasse and also the sense of sort of imaginative, you know, failure and where is I rooted? One of my suggestions is that, you know, what we’re up against — and we should realize that we’re up against it — is that petro-culture has filled our — for those of us privileged enough to have an abundance of energy at our disposal to live with this energy without conscience lifestyle — petro-culture has provided us with this rich sense memory archive of all these thrills and indulgences and conveniences and luxuries that petro-culture has given us. So when you talk about a radical break or a shift, immediately, I think people say, but I don’t have memories of this low-carbon future. I don’t I certainly don’t have positive memories, but I don’t have any memories of this low-carbon future. And so thus we tend to kind of retreat back to a sense of well, it must be impossible — or if it’s possible, it’s a dystopia of some kind. And so we fear it. And so it’s sort of easier to imagine apocalypse than the end of petro-culture. Just people said that about capitalism. I think the same goes for petro-culture. But this is why the humanities and especially the arts are so important. — speaking to the artists out there — because the arts have these amazing speculative and performative techniques for creating experiences and ideas and narratives and images that could be associated, that can kind of give us memories of these futures that we need…so desperately need. And I think there’s just you know, I enjoy the work I do with artists, maybe more than any, because I think that this is where you can maybe begin to sort of map out the possibilities for low-carbon pleasures. And honestly, you know, when you begin to think about it, many of the best things in life are low-carbon anyway. If you really begin to think about it, you know, the walks outside in the sun, the intimacies, you know, with your friends and partners and so forth. These are beautiful things that don’t require a lot of high carbon. When you begin to sort of re-rewire your pleasure circuits a little bit in that way, I think it can help a lot to sort of create the sense of possibility. So it’s this again. I don’t think it is one thing. It’s incremental work sort of reorganizing our desires and imagining sort of positive futures that are associated with low-carbon lifestyles. So I think this is the work that has to be done. Yeah, I can definitely build off of that with regard to what Dominic says about, you know, having no memories of low-carbon futures. One of my favorite ideas from Graeme Macdonald is reading 19th-century fiction and doing what he calls chronological backflips to understand what a low-carbon future might look like based on reading, you know, an earlier version of that. And so he reads 19th-century novels for an account of what it means to have to walk everywhere. And it’s a kind of delightful thought experiment. And I’m thinking of a Gayatri Spivak’s description of the work of the humanities as the non-coercive rearrangement of desire. And that’s kind of echoing what Dominic was saying about rewiring desire. And it seems to me that transition is coming. You know, whether we like it or not. And so I think one of the fundamental questions about energy in energy humanities is “what kind of transition do we want?” And so thinking about what a mindful transition to kind of echo the language of well-being, what a just transition would look like it, and how to take incremental steps toward getting there. And so I think that this means a redefinition of what well-being is and what we mean by well-being. What counts as well-being. And I think it would involve those kinds of relationality is that we’ve been talking about, and recognizing that well-being may not be the same as pleasure or what we have thought of as pleasure may be inimical to well-being. So I guess the last thing I would say to try to invoke the question of play is that, maybe it was two…it must have been actually two years ago now I was at an event — I think Dominic must have been there as well — on solarity And what I did in my solarity workshop was, with the help and in the company of others, I, in theory, in actuality, but I in theory made my own solar panel. And I say “in theory,” because it didn’t work. My solar panel didn’t work. Other people’s solar panels did work. And so I think part of what was so wonderful about this experience of making my own solar panel was letting go of the idea that what I do is, some kind of mastery. Right. And kind of leaning into a kind of DIY mode in which I was doing things I didn’t know how to do. Right. And in the sense of play. And I think part of what was powerful to me as I was struggling in frustration to make my solar panel was the idea that the way that solar panels work is that, you know, the electrons are bouncing on these surfaces and they’re incredibly inefficient. Solar panels, they kind of they transform into usable energy only a very small percentage of what’s actually happening with those electrons. And I have kind of held onto that as a metaphor for letting go of the demand for productivity. Right. Letting go of the idea that every electron bouncing in my mind must lead to something. So I think this gets both to the question that Firat raised about play. Where is the place of play? And I think play might be partly about letting go of that Cara Daggett idea of energy that Dominic mentioned that’s all about work. And we’re worrying about waste. Right. And so to think about a way of being that isn’t just about work. And that is about play. And it is about doing things that we don’t know how to do yet. Right.

Thank you so much. We have about five to six minutes left. So in the interest of time, I’ll try to sort of put some of the questions in a thematic cluster. I think in a way they all point out at the unevennesses of lived experiences of energy, especially in the Global South. I think the questions that Petra, Diana, Danya, Jeff, in particular, have been asking center around that question. So to start with Petra’s question, do you agree that an everyday approach helps acknowledge fragmented experiences that are based in different energy regimes that coexist, not just oil, and allows for complexity of historical agency of energy actors, who are never only producers or consumers of energy? Danya Saleh’s question: What do the panelists working in Energy Humanities think about the different green new deals, peoples Green New Deal, Red Deal from the Red Nation, they might they map out ways forward beyond riding bikes and also center reparations to the Global South. Diana’s comment also is in that line in differentiating extractivism — coal versus dam — are we also differentiating petro-violence versus hydro-violence? And finally, I think Jeff’s question, some of it was and in certain ways, but worth asking still, how do we work toward a post-petrol, that is also a just one.

I can start and just be very quick. I’ve actually oh, there it is. I had lost Petra’s question, but I want to answer it by way of a photograph from Ed Kashi. This is in the collection. Curse of the Black Gold: 50 years of Oil in the Niger Delta. And this image is so powerful to me because it is an image of energy simultaneity. Right. So we can understand that these enormous tanks here contain fossil fuels that will be piped elsewhere and not for use in Nigeria. And so we see the kind of muscular labor of these men chopping wood to burn. So we see kind of two energy regimes operating at the same time. And so I think that I’ve lost her question again. But I think that thinking about the unevenness in one place is, a really helpful way of thinking. And about the question of violence, I would say…I think somebody else had asked about dirty-clean fuel and petro-violence versus hydro violence. And I think that the very quick thing I would say about that is that it feels to me, and this might not be right, but it feels to me that there is a tendency toward violence that is inherent in scaling up. Right. So I think many kinds of energy become violent or dirty through this process of scaling up. And I don’t know what to do about that. Right. But I feel like scale is important in thinking about those problems. I could follow on that a little bit. That’s a really interesting point, Jennifer, the last point about the violence of scaling up and I think that there definitely is, this is another one of David Hughes’s arguments as one of the things that the plantation system did was to weave violence into sort of what we would think of as globalization in a very fundamental way so that you couldn’t have that transatlantic capitalism without a whole lot of violence being waged. And so and that’s sort of a legacy that we haven’t really come to terms with a lot of ways in terms of how much it’s fed into globalization more generally. The sense that, you know, the translocal flows are more important than what might happen to people in the communities where resource frontiers. And I think that’s always been an issue. And so a couple of thoughts. I mean, you know, one thought — and this comes out of a German solarity thinkers like Hermann Scheer — is to really sort of move towards hyper-local energy, to really focus on, you know, you use the energy you can make in your community or you can make in your home and that you don’t need the sort of apparatus of sort of long-distance energy systems. In fact, as he saw, like a lot of state violence and was really wrapped up in sort of, you know, managing those long distance flows, like why else is the United States invading the Middle East all the time, if not to guarantee its petro-political, you know, sort of systems? So I think that’s one model. And then there’s another model, which may be more utopian, but I think as we’re thinking about, is are there ways we could move towards more ethical kinds of globalization, more ethical kinds of trans-local relationships? Are they necessarily violent? Can we imagine that there are other models available? And I think that there are some that are out there, you know, that that might exist as alternatives that could be explored. But I think on the whole, you know, it’s probably an issue, as you say, Jennifer, that really has to be thought of as a problem of scale and how we can scale the energy transition in a way that reduces the violence of the previous energy systems. Again, the danger of going last, a lot’s been said, but Dominic, you just used the word ethical. I’m not sure if I have a lot to add in terms of of unevenness, in equality, power, justice, and so forth, because that’s definitely been a thread running through our presentations and the conversations and questions. And so I’m left with the question of how do “we” — again, the problematic “we” — how do we get people to care about ethics and justice and others, whether it’s local, others or just… And also acknowledge the ways in which many of us are already, you know, are implicated in systems that are dependent on unevenness and extraction and violence in order to have energy or convenience or ease of luxury elsewhere.

Thank you so much. Our time is now up. My colleague Danyel Reiche had asked, and I won’t expect you to answer this question, but his question was, what are the issues unique to Qatar and the Gulf when discussing lived everyday energy experiences? I’ll keep this question is an excuse to bring you to Doha when conditions permit. But it is also a question that, as a research group, we are aiming to delve into in detail. Now, I would like to hand it over to Dean Dallal to provide his conclusion or remarks.

Thank you so much for this extremely interesting discussion and the great launch for our project. I hope the audience will join us in future activities and I hope we will, before long, we’ll be able to host you here in Doha. Thank you so much.

Resources

Books

Energy Humanities: An Anthology, edited by Imre Szeman and Dominic Boyer
Energopolitics: Wind and Power in the Anthropocene, by Dominic Boyer
Fueling Culture: 101 Words for Energy and Environment, edited by Imre Szeman, Jennifer Wenzel, and Patricia Yaeger
Confluence: The Nature of Technology and the Remaking of the Rhône, by Sara B. Pritchard
New Natures: Joining Environmental History with Science and Technology Studies, edited by Dolly Jørgensen, Finn Arne Jørgensen, and Sara B. Pritchard
Technology and the Environment in History, by Sara B. Pritchard and Carl A. Zimring
The Disposition of Nature: Environmental Crisis and World Literature, by Jennifer Wenzel
Bulletproof: Afterlives of Anticolonial Prophecy in South Africa and Beyond, by Jennifer Wenzel
Living Oil: Petroleum Culture in the American Century, by Stephanie LeMenager
Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History, by Sidney W. Mintz
A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None, by Kathryn Yusoff
The Birth of Energy: Fossil Fuels, Thermodynamics, and the Politics of Work, by Cara New Daggett
Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil, by Timothy Mitchell
Lifeblood: Oil, Freedom, and the Forces of Capital, by Matthew T. Huber
The Next Catastrophe: Reducing Our Vulnerabilities to Natural, Industrial, and Terrorist Disasters, by Charles Perrow
The Multichannel Retail Handbook, by Chris Jones
Power Lines: Phoenix and the Making of the Modern Southwest, by Andrew Needham
The Work of Invisibility: Radiation Hazards and Occupational Health in South African Uranium Production, by Gabrielle Hecht
The Oil Lamp: Poems, by Ogaga Ifowodo
Orientalism, by Edward W. Said
Curse of The Black Gold: 50 Years of Oil in the Niger Delta, by Ed Kashi

Articles

Wenzel, Jennifer. “How to read for oil.” Resilience: A Journal of the Environmental Humanities 1, no. 3 (2014): 156-161.
Cronon, William. “The trouble with wilderness: or, getting back to the wrong nature.” Environmental history 1, no. 1 (1996): 7-28.
Buck, Holly Jean. “On the possibilities of a charming Anthropocene.” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 105, no. 2 (2015): 369-377.

Films

Not Ok – Cymene Howe and Dominic Boyer

La última cena - The Last Supper
2022-01-18 18:00 - 20:30 (Europe/Moscow) | Education City, Al Luqta St, Ar-Rayyan, Doha, Qatar
Film Synopsis:On a Cuban sugar plantation in the 1790s, a count casts himself as Jesus Christ to re-enact the Catholic holy week with twelve of the men he is enslaving, until, on Good Friday, the enslaved people on the plantation revolt. Tomás Gutiérrez Alea’s masterpiece was part of the new Latin American Cinema of the 1960s and 1970s, actively engaging the viewer in a process of democratic critique.

Content Warning: drama, violence & gore, cruelty, torture, frightening and intense scenes, sensitive subject, racial slur, PG 18+

The film was screened via a virtual event on January 18 and was followed by a community discussion facilitated by Professor Robert Carson

Robert Carson is Assistant Professor of English in the Liberal Arts Program at Texas A&M University at Qatar. His work has appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, The American Interest, and The Journal of the Gilded and Progressive Era. He is currently working on a book on political commitment in 20th-century British and post-colonial fiction.

Daughters of the Dust
2022-02-01 18:00 - 20:30 (Europe/Moscow) | Education City, Al Luqta St, Ar-Rayyan, Doha, Qatar
Film Synopsis:Languid look at the Gullah culture of the sea islands off the coast of South Carolina and Georgia where African folk-The women of the Peazant family struggle with a decision which will remake their relationship with their heritage and with each other. Julie Dash’s groundbreaking 1991 film tells the story of generational change in the Gullah community of the South Carolina sea islands with rich visual language and non-linear narrative.

Content Warning: drama, romance, violence, profanity, racial bias, PG 18+

The film was screened on February 1 via a virtual event and was followed by a community discussion facilitated by Professor Dana Olwan

Dana Olwan is an Associate Professor in the Master of Arts in Women, Society, and Development program at Hamad bin Khalifa University. Her work is located at the nexus of feminist theorizations of gender violence, transnational solidarities, and critical feminist pedagogies. Her writings have appeared in Signs, Feminist Formations, the Journal of Settler Colonial Studies, American Quarterly, and Feral Feminisms. Her first book Gender Violence and The Transnational Politics of the Honor Crime was published by Ohio State University Press in 2021. She is co-editor with Chandra Talpade Mohanty of the Reimagining Comparative Feminist Studies book series from Palgrave Macmillan. She teaches courses on feminist theory, gender politics in the Middle East and North Africa, and women, labor, and development.

Additional Resources

Beyoncé, Lemonade (2016)
Katherine McKittrick

Demonic Grounds (Minnesota, 2006)
Dear Science and Other Stories (Duke, 2021).
May be worth linking directly to her site since there are multimedia formats to engage these texts, including examples of her citational practices.

Saidiya Hartman

“Venus in Two Acts” Small Axe, vol. 12 no. 2, 2008, p. 1-14. Project MUSE muse.jhu.edu/article/241115
Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (Oxford, 1997).

Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women, and Queer Radicals (Norton, 2020)

Who Belongs to a Country? National Representation and Identity at the FIFA World Cup 2022
2022-02-02 08:00 - 17:00 (Europe/Moscow) | Education City, Al Luqta St, Ar-Rayyan, Doha, Qatar
Panelists: Zahra Babar, Gijs van Campenhout, Ross Griffin, Edward J. Kolla, and Peter Sprio

Moderator: Danyel Reiche

The panel discussion explored critical issues such as the recruitment and naturalisation of top foreign athletes, a practice that is making national dreams come true, but also stirring public debate around sports and national identity. Centering on Qatar’s role in shaping the global conversation around sports and society, the webinar covered a range of topics, including the reasons athletes switch nationalities and the citizenship requirements set forth by international sporting federations such as FIFA. The panelists also explored conceptions of ethnicity and civic nationalism, and the future of citizenship and residency laws in a globalised world.

Tula: The Revolt
2022-02-15 17:30 - 20:00 (Europe/Moscow) | Education City, Al Luqta St, Ar-Rayyan, Doha, Qatar
Film Synopsis:On Curaçao in the Dutch West Indies, Tula leads a revolt. The enslaved people who seized their freedom on the island in 1795 would be brutally repressed and slavery reimposed, but today the revolt is recognized as being the beginning of the end of slavery in the Dutch Caribbean. Leinders’ film features actor Danny Glover, who has advocated and worked to bring stories of slave revolution to the American cinema.

Content Warning: history, war, violence, racial bias, PG 18+

The film was screened on February 15 and was followed by a community discussion facilitated by Professor Trish Kahle

Trish Kahle is an Assistant Professor of history at Georgetown University Qatar. Her work focuses on history of energy, work, and politics in the modern United States and the world. Currently, she is working on her first book, which traces the emergence of energy citizenship—a form of national belonging defined by the rights and obligations of energy production, distribution, and consumption—from the coal mining workplace in the modern United States. A second project examines the role of utility companies in defining what counts as “energy work” by organizing both individuals and communities into energy producers and energy consumers. Her research has appeared in Labor, the Journal of Energy History/ Revue d’Histoire de l’Énergie, and American Quarterly. Support for my work has come from the Mellon Foundation, the Jefferson Scholars Foundation at the University of Virginia, the American Society for Environmental History, the Western Association of Women Historians, the Labor and Working-Class History Association, the Center for the History of Business, Technology, and Society, the University of Chicago, and several research libraries.

Adanggaman
2022-03-08 17:30 - 20:30 (Europe/Moscow) | Education City, Al Luqta St, Ar-Rayyan, Doha, Qatar
Film Synopsis:In West Africa during the late 17th century, King Adanggaman leads a war against his neighboring tribes, ordering his soldiers to torch enemy villages, kill the elderly and capture the healthy tribesmen to sell to the European slave traders. When his village falls prey to one of Adanggaman’s attacks, Ossei manages to escape, but his family is murdered except for his captured mother. Chasing after the soldiers in an effort to free her, Ossei is befriended by a fierce warrior named Naka.

Content Warning: violence, brutality, racial slur, sensitive subject, PG 18+

Free Screening

LOCATION: Georgetown University Qatar

The film was screened on March 8 and was followed by a community discussion facilitated by Professor James Hodapp

James Hodapp is an Assistant Professor of English at Northwestern University in Qatar in the Liberal Arts Program where his primary focus is African and postcolonial literature and visual cultures. His work on literature, cinema, comic arts, television, and podcasts from Africa have appeared in Journal of Commonwealth Literature, The Journal of Postcolonial Writing, African Literature Today,  ARIEL, Research in African Literatures, and English in Africa, among others. He is also the editor of the collections Afropolitan Literature as World Literature and Graphic Novels and Comics as World Literature from Bloomsbury academic publishing.

Qatar’s World Cup Goals: Moving from the Periphery to the Center Working Group I
2022-03-09 09:00 - 2022-03-10 17:00 (Europe/Moscow) | Education City, Al Luqta St, Ar-Rayyan, Doha, Qatar
On March 9-10, 2022, CIRS convened the first Working Group under its newly launched research initiative on Qatar’s World Cup Goals: Moving from the Periphery to the Center. The meeting was held as a hybrid event, allowing for both virtual and in-person participation. The goal of the working group was to bring together scholars from different disciplines to examine the role of the upcoming FIFA World Cup in enabling the state of Qatar to move from the periphery of global sports and politics to the center. Applying both empirical and theoretical lenses, the invited scholars addressed a number of topics including Qatar’s national security, the impact of the pandemic on mega-sporting events, national identity, tourism, and sports sponsorships.

The meeting began with Gerd Nonneman’s discussion on the links between Qatar’s national security and the World Cup. He noted that the Cup was one component of a wider and longer-term security and developmental strategy since the 1990s of raising Qatar’s global visibility, acquiring economic resources, moving to sustainability, and building supportive global networks. Given its small size, limited hard power resources, and powerful neighbors, security has been a key driver of Qatari policies at home and abroad. Liquefied natural gas (LNG) development brought both resources and global economic networks. To the continuing aim of building equally global diplomatic networks was then added the ambition to build a sustainable economy beyond hydrocarbon dependence. Staging the World Cup aimed to serve these goals, by raising global awareness of the “Brand Qatar” and helping to lay the foundations for a more diversified economy. It also helped accelerate not only the building of the infrastructural underpinnings for future development, but equally necessary reforms of migration and labor policies – attempting to match the needs of a viable future economy and global branding with the exploration of an evolving national identity.

The second session of the working group focused on the World Cup 2022 and the pandemic. Kamilla Swart suggested that Covid-19 was almost entirely unique in how it upended the sporting world. While we are currently witnessing the return of competitive sports at various levels, the pandemic still remains a threat. In preparation for hosting the World Cup in winter 2022, Qatar has effectively hosted ‘test events’, such as the FIFA Arab Cup, and implemented restrictions and social distancing during the games. Swart stated that the compact nature of the World Cup will be a challenge, especially in regards to implementing Covid protocols and managing the influx of the expected visitors. She highlighted that some of the key areas that require research are the nature of Covid protocols, fan management, vaccination administration and statuses, non-communicable disease, injuries prevention, and the burden on health care and medical facilities during the games. Swart suggested that new risks and disaster management during the World Cup is a key area requiring new research.

Continuing the discussion on health-related issues, Andreas Flouris addressed the question of whether serving as hosts to the World Cup leads to the promotion of a healthy lifestyle. Flouris pointed out that, based on existing health data on Qatar, 70% of deaths in the country occur due to chronic diseases, most of which are tied to obesity and low levels of physical activity. Qatar has adopted policies and undertaken new interventions such as tobacco-free policy, building of recreational spaces for physical activity, and the Tamreen education programs in schools that are all geared towards promoting healthy lifestyle. The Ministry of Health in Qatar is engaged in a 3-year collaboration with the World Health Organization for health promotion. Health and nutrition programs have also been developed in the country. However, the core question of whether the 2022 FIFA World Cup has enabled an overall healthier lifestyle in Qatar still needs to be addressed. Are there efforts underway to encourage the aging citizen population to adopt healthier habits? At a global level, there is little evidence on whether mega sporting events such as the World Cup actually have a positive health impact on host countries. Flouris suggested that there is a need to collect baseline and longitudinal data and compare Qatar with other countries that have hosted the World Cup. Additionally, Flouris discussed the lack of school physical education curriculum and the impact of a harsh environment and desert climate as being critical issues affecting patterns of physical activity.

Andreas Krieg examined how Qatar’s engagements in Afghanistan as well the hosting of the World Cup 2022 have both been means by which the state has exhibited its soft power. Post Arab Uprisings Qatar has been translating its financial power into regional and global influence, and the World Cup and Afghanistan have served as sites where Qatar has been able to display its power of appeal and attraction. Krieg stated that diplomacy, investment, energy and LNG demand, education and developmental policies, and sports are the main tools through which Qatar is trying to achieve its policy goals. Whereas military action is the least influential lever of its soft power. The World Cup has put Qatar and the MENA region on the global map and the Afghanistan moment has helped Qatar build networks and increase regional influence in Asia. Bridging the gap between the western world and Islamic countries and the exploration of Qatar’s potential as a mediator were identified by Krieg as key areas of further research.

Danyel Reiche focused his remarks on the topic of Qatar Airways and its sports sponsorships, with Germany’s leading football club Bayern Munich serving as a case study. Reiche stated that Qatar Airways, which has been operational for 25 years, has been leveraged by the state to achieve various state objectives including enhancing its visibility in the global realm. Qatar Airways has a history of sports sponsorships which was amplified post the financial crisis of 2008. The airline was the shirt sponsor for Barcelona from 2013-2017 and is currently Bayern Munich’s sleeve sponsor in an agreement that started in 2018 and goes until 2023. Reiche explained that while these sponsorships give the state of Qatar a lot of exposure, they also show the limitations of soft power approaches. These sponsorships have met with a lot of resistance on the ground in the European states where these teams are based. Reiche suggested there was a need to explore why there is such a persistent critique of this particular sponsor and not of others from non-democratic countries.

Ross Griffin examined Qatar’s national identity in relation to the Qatari-owned French football club Paris St. Germain (PSG). Griffin suggested that Qatar has used sports to shape its national identity while simultaneously positively projecting its identity to the rest of the world. The acquisition of PSG has been part of state efforts to promote a global image of Qatar as a progressive state. Much of the attention that Qatar has garnered from the global sporting world since being awarded the bid to host the 2022 World Cup Qatar has been negative. PSG has partially served to dissipate some of that negative attention. Griffin outlined that some key questions to explore would be to look at how the ownership of PSG defines Qatar’s national identity. How do PSG fans react to this ownerships and how progressive national identity is being achieved with the hiring of elite and famous football players?

Sebastian Sons led the discussion on the nexus of Qatar’s development assistance and sport. He detailed Qatar’s humanitarian aid portfolio in recent years and stated that Qatar’s development assistance has been closely related to domestics polices, economic diversification, geo-strategic interests and its ideological affiliations. In recent years, there was a fundamental shift in the nature of the aid provided. It shifted from Islamic forms of aid to development assistance, with the focus on financing youth and female developmental projects. Sons specified that the main point of query is to question how do sports come into this story of Qatar’s developmental aid. He narrated that Qatar has been financing sports developmental projects in partner countries and on a domestic level, but it remains unclear what are Qatar’s interests in becoming a hub of exchange and human development in the fields of sports and development. Examining what role sports play in regional integration and cooperation, in identity construction and migration through different development projects, were some key areas identified.

Kristian Coates Ulrichsen explored Qatar’s New Development Model and argued that over the years Qatar has built a branding model that is based on diplomacy. Qatari policy making, which is influenced by the Qatar Vision 2030 has aimed to build a unique developmental model. Various construction, infrastructure development projects, and domestic policy changes have propelled the country towards a progressive state. During the blockade of 2017 regional associations and collaborations were affected which now have been revived. Ulrichsen argued that there is a need to examine what tangible legacy this model will have and what measures could be undertaken in regard to migrant labor issues that the country has been facing since winning the bid for hosting the World Cup.

Irene Theodoropoulou led the discussion on Sports Tourism in Qatar and FIFA 2022 for the next session. She argued that Qatar will be using tourism to rectify its global image and diversify its economy. Qatar Tourism has combined the traditional with modernity to develop a new tourism strategy that aims to put Qatar on the global map in terms of culture, sports, business, and family entertainment tourism. A new airport and visa free arrival policy has been developed to diversify tourism in the country. Theodoropoulou highlighted that further study needs to be conducted in the areas of intercultural communications in Qatar, demographics of tourists expected during the World Cup, improving relations and developing synergies between Qatar Tourism and Qatar Airways, and developing better media relations.

The discussion then shifted to beIN sports and its global influence. Craig LaMay addressed beIN’s dominance over football broadcasting in the MENA region as well as coverage of other sports in the U.S. and UK. He stated that since beIN was a private entity, publicly available records of its operations do not exist. beIN’s regional and global operations have been severely affected during the pandemic, and the company will need to innovate in order to be competitive and to retain its broadcasting rights. Its model of pay-TV is being challenged by streaming services and even free-to-air alternatives. beIN’s traditional bundled service not only faces competition from new models and a variety of cheaper services but also has to deal with issues such as piracy and non-live content provision for its customers across the globe.

Uday Chandra and Aisha Al-Kuwari initiated the conversation on Qatar 2022 and Popular Culture. Chandra argued that there is a need to understand the nature of fandom in Qatar and how the preparations for the World Cup have remade popular culture. Aisha explained that fan culture in Qatar is associated with a fireej or neighborhood, and fans had loyalties to the local clubs established by community elders in these neighborhoods. She added that fandom was also associated with the culture of majlises, in which people gather to watch games and root for teams. Women’s increasing participation in football fandom in Doha, including in stadiums in the recent Arab Cup, and the limitations of gender stereotypes in journalistic accounts also came through in Aisha’s remarks. With respect to non-citizens, Chandra spoke of their absence from discussions of fandom and popular culture in Qatar and highlighted recent scholarship that shows strong loyalties to host societies in the Gulf. Although migrant workers recurrently appear as mute victims in Western European commentary on the World Cup, labor activism by these workers remains understudied.

The next session looked at Aspire Zone and its rise to become a Global Benchmark for Talent Development and Sports Medicine. Paul Brannagan explained that small states tend to find niche industries that are culturally different and sets them apart from their neighbors. For Qatar, sports is the niche industry through which it is making a mark on the global stage. Aspire Zone and Sports Academy are part of Qatar’s sporting strategy and aids the State in building its sports portfolio. Brannagan identified that there is the need to examine how and where Aspire fits in Qatar’s sporting investments and global political agenda. He also highlighted that through Aspire, Qatar is producing a stream of athletes and is showing its ability of overcoming the disadvantage of its population size. The legacy of Aspire post-2022, the role of Aspire in sports humanitarianism, and global sports medicine were some other key research areas identified.

Johan Granberg discussed community building and the Education City Stadium. He stated that identity doesn’t make people stay and that people required environments that they could co-exist with. Building a stadium in a city is a good project for the city and helps build its image but there are very little examples of these buildings being good for the community. The stadium in Education City might be a good example of a good stadium but lacks the communal aspect and engagement required by society. He stressed that often stadiums become beautiful object that has very little use for the community after the games. Granberg expressed that the questions of how the Education City community can use the arena and what can be gained from it requires further exploration and research.

Th last session of the meeting looked at Sport Security and the Role of the International Center for Sports Security (ICSS). Magda De Lange expanded on ICSS’s role in addressing safety and security in global sporting events. She stated that while work has been done to address issues of safety and security in traditional sports, research on esports remain limited. An athlete-centered esports ecosystem is developing as a new trend. Of critical concern is that there are sparse, decentralized resources for collegiate esports players and limited regulation or fact-checking for practices. Gaps in the existing scholarship which could benefit from academic exploration and new research are: research on how to provide consistent guidelines to support young esports players; dual careers of esports athletes; the use and promotion of esports as an added value for P/CVE interventions to increase societal resilience and empowerment. Esports research’s key barriers and key considerations include understanding the ecosystem of esports, sampling by device, then by game genre, examining the positive impacts of esports, and emphasizing equity in players.

In conclusion, Dean Clyde Wilcox, Director of CIRS, thanked the participants for identifying key gaps in the literature. It is worth noting that invited participants will contribute empirically grounded papers addressing questions and gaps identified during the meeting, among others, to be published in an edited volume under the auspices of CIRS. The second working group for the project will be held in Fall 2022.

In conclusion, Dean Clyde Wilcox, Director of CIRS, thanked the participants for identifying key gaps in the literature. It is worth noting that invited participants will contribute empirically grounded papers addressing questions and gaps identified during the meeting, among others, to be published in an edited volume under the auspices of CIRS. The second working group for the project will be held in Fall 2022.

To view the working group agenda, click hereTo read the participants’ biographies, click hereRead more about this research initiative

Participants and Discussants:

Aisha Al Kuwari, Georgetown University in QatarHend Al-Muftah, Doha Institute for Graduate Studies, QatarMariam Al-Thani, Georgetown University in QatarZahra Babar, CIRS – Georgetown University in QatarKathy Babiak, University of MichiganMisba Bhatti, CIRS – Georgetown University in QatarPaul Brannagan, Manchester Metropolitan University, UKUday Chandra, Georgetown University in QatarKristian Coates Ulrichsen, Rice UniversityMagda de Lange, International Center for Sport Security (ICSS), QatarAndreas Flouris, University of OttawaJohan Granberg, Virginia Commonwealth University–QatarRoss Griffin, Qatar University Andreas Krieg, King’s College LondonCraig LaMay, Northwestern University in QatarSuzi Mirgani, CIRS – Georgetown University in QatarGerd Nonneman, Georgetown University in QatarDanyel Reiche, Georgetown University in QatarSebastian Sons, Center for Applied Research in Partnership with the Orient (CARPO)Kamilla Swart, Hamad bin Khalifa University (HBKU)Irene Theodoropoulou, Qatar UniversityElizabeth Wanucha, CIRS – Georgetown University QatarClyde Wilcox, Georgetown University in Qatar

Article by Misba Bhatti, Research Analyst at CIRS

How Has the World Cup 2022 Changed Qatar?
2022-03-20 18:00 - 19:30 (Europe/Moscow) | Education City, Al Luqta St, Ar-Rayyan, Doha, Qatar
Ever since Qatar was awarded the hosting rights for the FIFA World Cup 2022TM in December 2010, the small state has been criticized for its human rights record in Western media, particularly by British newspapers. In our panel, we will discuss the changes that have taken place in Qatar in the last decade and the challenges that remain. We will also focus on migrant workers and women’s rights and how staging the world’s most remarkable sporting event has impacted the diversification of Qatar’s natural gas dependent economy, and its relations with other countries in the region and worldwide.

Featuring: Danyel Reiche, Amal Al-Malki, Gerd Nonneman, Alexis Antoniades, Haya Al-Noaimi, Max Tuñón.

Harriet
2022-03-22 18:00 - 20:30 (Europe/Moscow) | Education City, Al Luqta St, Ar-Rayyan, Doha, Qatar
Film Synopsis:The extraordinary tale of Harriet Tubman’s escape from slavery and transformation into one of America’s greatest heroes, whose courage, ingenuity, and tenacity freed hundreds of slaves and changed the course of history.

Content Warning: violence & gore, cruelty, torture, profanity, alcohol consumption, frightening. Rated R, PG 18+

Free Screening

LOCATION: To be updated closer to the date.

The film was screened on March 22 and was followed by a community discussion facilitated by Professor Brittany Bounds

Brittany Bounds teaches critical thinking and social skills through U.S. History and American Military History to undergrads at TAMU-Q. She is also the co-chair of the Women’s Faculty Forum, which supports female faculty, academic staff, and students at the university. She also advises the Engineering Entrepreneurship Society who encourage students to combine their engineering and business skills. Dr. Bounds further engages students through STEAM by putting the A into STEM through the annual Showcase of student projects that display creativity through video and poster. Dr. Bounds obtained her Ph.D. in U.S. History with an emphasis in social/cultural and military/diplomatic history at Texas A&M University in College Station. Her research centers on U.S. history and how its roots explain current debates in American society. Her dissertation explored the Silent Majority’s reaction to the social movements of the 60s: the response to civil rights, campus liberals, antiwar protesters, racial riots, and women’s liberation by examining written modes of communication from a media-silenced American majority. Her publications include topics on the Civil War, 1960s culture, and counterterrorism.

Mediterranea & Al-Sit
2022-03-30 18:00 - 20:30 (Europe/Moscow) | Education City, Al Luqta St, Ar-Rayyan, Doha, Qatar
Mediterranea

Film Synopsis:The film depicts the Africans’ interaction with Italians, and their lives as migrant workers, which includes friendships and animosities, boredom, and temptation.

Content Warning: violence, gore, profanity, alcohol and drugs consumption, smoking, frightening & intense scenes, sex & nudity, PG 18+

Al-Sit

Film Synopsis:In a cotton-farming village in Sudan, 15-year-old Nafisa has a crush on Babiker, but her parents have arranged her marriage to Nadir, a young Sudanese businessman living abroad. Nafisa’s grandmother Al-Sit, the powerful village matriarch, has her own plans for Nafisa’s future. But can Nafisa choose for herself?

Content: Short film, in Arabic with English subtitles

The screening followed a community discussion facilitated by Professor Trish Kahle.

Trish Kahle is an Assistant Professor of history at Georgetown University Qatar. Her work focuses on history of energy, work, and politics in the modern United States and the world. Currently, she is working on her first book, which traces the emergence of energy citizenship—a form of national belonging defined by the rights and obligations of energy production, distribution, and consumption—from the coal mining workplace in the modern United States. A second project examines the role of utility companies in defining what counts as “energy work” by organizing both individuals and communities into energy producers and energy consumers. Her research has appeared in Labor, the Journal of Energy History/ Revue d’Histoire de l’Énergie, and American Quarterly. Support for my work has come from the Mellon Foundation, the Jefferson Scholars Foundation at the University of Virginia, the American Society for Environmental History, the Western Association of Women Historians, the Labor and Working-Class History Association, the Center for the History of Business, Technology, and Society, the University of Chicago, and several research libraries.

Global Perspectives on Slavery and Freedom on Film
2022-04-13 18:00 - 19:30 (Asia/Qatar) | Education City, Al Luqta St, Ar-Rayyan, Doha, Qatar
The Webinar was a concluding panel discussion for our Cinematic Afterlives film series and aimed to discuss the stakes and challenges of portraying slavery and abolition through film from different perspectives and geographic contexts.

Speakers: Alyssa Sepinwall (California State University San Marcos), Dexter Gabriel (University of Connecticut), Parisa Vaziri (Cornell University) , and Firat Oruc (Georgetown University in Qatar)Moderator: Trish Kahle (Georgetown University in Qatar)

This event is part of Cinematic Afterlives: Film and Memory in the Black Atlantic research project.

Affects of Energy Transition Working Group I
2022-05-24 08:00 - 17:00 (Europe/Moscow) | Education City, Al Luqta St, Ar-Rayyan, Doha, Qatar
On May 24, 2022, the Center for International and Regional Studies at Georgetown University Qatar convened the first working group under its Energy and Affect Theory research project. The working group, led by GU-Q faculty members Trish Kahle, Firat Oruc, and Victoria Googasian, was held virtually and brought together multidisciplinary scholars to discuss their paper abstracts for written contributions that are being developed as a journal special issue. The participants engaged in focused discussions on cross-cutting themes of affect, energy transition, and labor that will inform all of the papers in the collection.

Animesh Chatterjee proposed a study of everyday experiences of energy in colonial Calcutta’s domestic spheres, around 1875 – 1940s. His paper contribution builds on a larger book project which describes the social life of electricity in colonial Calcutta. He proposes to examine how class and social identities shaped the ways in which people interacted with and made meanings of different forms of energy, especially electricity. His study focuses on the gendering of energy consumption in the domestic sphere, as well as the politics of energy use in the context of colonialism and Bengali nationalism.

Ewan Gibbs’ paper assesses lives in energy industries, focused on workers’ experiences in Britain’s coal and offshore oil and gas sector, as well as in nuclear and conventional power generation. Using oral histories that were structured around telling life stories, he examines how workers’ experiences incorporate reflections on local and national experiences of energy transitions. By concentrating on transition as a workplace and community experience, Gibbs studies how workers made sense of movements from one source of energy to the other and how they implicated themselves within larger processes of economic change. Through a contrast between experiences in the UK’s major energy sectors, this article also contributes to understanding of distinctions between labor regimes as well as the commonalities that underlay conceptions of what it meant to be British energy workers.

Anne Pasek’s contribution looks at how people see and sensorialize carbon. Pasek argues that while carbon is dominant in everyday life and industrial processes, it is not always visible. Her paper will look at the sensorial politics of carbon in carbon removal and sequestration, examining how the process is tied up in energy transitions more broadly. Pasek also seeks to examine the experiences of carbon removal workers and their emotional and affective stakes for the work they do. Her aim is to map their affective involvement in their work on behalf of the climate system. Pasek proposes to study these processes by bringing together the labor theory of value with affect theory.

Victoria Googasian will contribute a paper that explores a sub-genre of science fiction, the space opera. These literary works imagine human life centuries into the future and involve interplanetary and interstellar travel. Googasian explained that while space operas texts narrate human futures that depend on vast reserves of energy, they rarely explore questions of where the energy is to come from or what kinds of energy transitions may underwrite their worldbuilding. Instead, they maintain a fantasy of endless imperial expansion and human power over material environments. However, throughout the history of the genre, space opera also imagines characters who are materially embedded in their energy systems and characterized by embodied vulnerability. Taking these characters as a starting point, Googasian aims to study whether this seemingly reactionary genre might have an alternative energy imaginary that is grounded in humility, finitude, and limits of energetic life.

In order to generate new possibilities and identify connections between their scholarship, the group was divided into several smaller break-out sessions where participants were invited to deliberate on particular themes and concepts. In the first break-out session, the four paper contributors were asked to think through and highlight questions of time and space in relation to affect in their own work. For the second breakout session, the participants explored the theme of labor in regards to identity/subjectivity and values/structures. The last session focused specifically on transition and questions on modes of perception and narrative and obscurity. Finally, the participants reconvened as a complete group to share some of the main questions and takeaways from the break-out sessions and discuss how these will be developed and addressed in the final drafts of the paper contributions.

The second working group for the project will be held in September 2022, in which participants will discuss and get feedback on their draft papers.

To view the working group agenda, click here

To read the participants’ biographies, click here

Read more about this research initiative

Participants and Discussants:

Zahra Babar, CIRS – Georgetown University in Qatar

Misba Bhatti, CIRS – Georgetown University in Qatar

Dominic Boyer, Rice University

Animesh Chatterjee, Technische Universität Darmstadt

Ewan Gibbs, University of Glasgow

Vicky Googasian, Georgetown University in Qatar

Trish Kahle, Georgetown University in Qatar

Firat Oruc, Georgetown University in Qatar

Anne Pasek, Trent University

Elizabeth Wanucha, CIRS – Georgetown University Qatar

Article by Misba Bhatti, Research Analyst at CIRS

CURA Paper Series Seminar
2022-08-01 08:00 - 17:00 (Europe/Moscow) | Education City, Al Luqta St, Ar-Rayyan, Doha, Qatar
On April 9, 2020, CIRS held the CURA Paper Series Seminar with a presentation by Adithi Sanjay, a GU-Q junior majoring in International Politics, and the winner of the Spring 2020 CURA Paper Series Competition. The CURA program launched the competition under its paper series initiative, which allows selected research papers to be published after editorial review, feedback, and revisions. Sanjay’s paper, titled “The Creation and Mobilization of Anti-China Sentiment by Interest Groups in Indian Society (2012-2018),” was chosen as the winner of the competition from a competitive pool of submitted papers.

The winner of the competition had the opportunity to work with CIRS staff to elevate her research work with the goal of being published by the end of the semester. The seminar was organized to provide the student with professional development experience through presenting the paper to GU-Q peers and receiving their feedback. Due to COVID-19 related restrictions and to accommodate participants from various countries, Sanjay presented her research on anti-China sentiment in India via a Zoom meeting, which was attended by CURA fellows and CIRS staff.

Sanjay’s research methodology allowed for a micro-level analysis of the contemporary mobilization of anti-China protests in India. Using a global news monitoring and aggregation database that sourced more than 30,000 newspaper articles, she was able to compile a unique dataset cataloging anti-China protests on a state and regional level in India. The research scope covered anti-China protests from 2012 to 2018, a period spanning the incumbency of two Indian prime ministers as well as two military confrontations at the Sino-Indian border. Sanjay emphasized that anti-China sentiment in India has significant “implications for the level of [Sino-Indian] cooperation on economic, sociocultural, and political bases.” Her analysis focused on the six major drivers of anti-China sentiment that emerged as recurring themes across various anti-Chinese protest events: border tensions, economic tensions, religious tensions, historical and current oppression of Tibetans, Chinese support for Pakistan, and Chinese ministers’ visits to India.

Sanjay stated that “given the sheer size of the Indian population, [the] generalization of anti-China sentiment on a national level is problematic in that it glosses over the nuances of the issues driving public opinion of China in India,” As such, her research fills the gap in the preexisting literature on perceptions of China in India by analyzing the creation and mobilization of anti-China sentiment by three broad categories of stakeholders: non-political civil society organizations, political parties, and their affiliates, and the Indian central government.

The seminar began with the presenter’s remarks on the results and findings of her research and was followed by the question and answer portion that allowed for a fruitful discussion with every participant offering input. Sanjay shared that a limitation of her methodology is media bias, given that “small-size protests are not reported [in regional and national-level newspapers] and therefore considered ‘non-existent.’” As such, Sanjay suggested that data triangulation would enhance her research, as it would allow for the incorporation of ethnographic sources with her existing analysis of news reports. Sanjay concluded, “I enjoyed this experience, and I am grateful for all of your suggestions to improve on my paper and get it ready for publication.”

Sanjay’s winning paper will be published by CIRS in June 2020 and will be the inaugural paper published under the CURA Paper Series.

For the participants’ biographies, please click here

Article by J.I, CURA Research Fellow

CURA Seminar: Football in the Middle East
2022-08-01 08:00 - 17:00 (Europe/Moscow) | Education City, Al Luqta St, Ar-Rayyan, Doha, Qatar
On March 19, 2020, the Center for International and Regional Studies (CIRS) held a CURA seminar under its Undergraduate Research Advancement program. This is an opportunity for CURA Fellows to discuss new articles from scholars who have submitted to CIRS’s regional research initiative on “Football in the Middle East.” In observing local regulations for the prevention of the spread of COVID-19, the seminar was hosted online through Zoom. Two papers were critiqued, and feedback from the CURA Fellows was gathered to later share with the research working group.

Khushboo Shah (class of 2022) opened the seminar by presenting Danyel Reiche’s paper “Playing in the triple periphery: Exclusionary policies towards Palestinian football in Lebanon.” The paper explores the development of policy toward Palestinian football players in Lebanon through a chronological survey of policies and interviews with scholars and players. The author describes a gradual restriction of Palestinian football players through a series of quotas and fees imposed to restrict their number. Through a comparative perspective, Reiche emphasizes the relative lack of opportunities and flexibility Palestinian players have in Lebanon compared to those in Israel and Jordan.

Chaïmaa Benkermi (class of 2021) led the second half of the seminar by presenting Thomas Ross Griffin’s “Who Kisses the Badge? The Player’s Perspective in the Performance of National Identity in the Qatar National Team.” Griffin uses literary and social media analysis to understand the performance of nationalism of players in the Qatari National Football team. The author divides the players into three categories: those who were born Qatari (jus sanguinis), non-Qataris born in Qatar (jus soli), and naturalized players from Europe and North Africa (jus talenti). Griffin argues that players from all three groups express Qatari nationalism in similar ways despite their different origins, particularly in their embrace of the image of the Emir and the anthem Shoomila Shoomila.

Following the presentations, CURA fellow engaged in an in-depth discussion about the structure, theoretical framework, sources, and clarity and strength of each paper. While analyzing the papers’ significance to the current scholarship of Football in the Middle East, CURA fellows use the research and analytical skills they learn on the job and through various CURA activities to contribute to their assessments.

Following the seminar, Salma Hassabou (class of 2022) and Shaza Afifi (class of 2022) will serve as ambassadors to present the comments to the working group on “Football in the Middle East,” which will be held on a virtual platform in early April.

For the participants’ biographies, please click here

Article by Ngoc Nguyen, CURA Research Fellow

Global Histories and Practices of Islamophobia Working Group I
2022-08-08 17:00 - 2022-08-09 19:30 (Europe/Moscow) | Education City, Al Luqta St, Ar-Rayyan, Doha, Qatar
On August 8 and 9, 2022, the Center for International and Regional Studies (CIRS) organized the first research meeting under its initiative on Global Histories and Practices of Islamophobia. The meeting was held as a virtual event, with scholars participating from various geographical locations. The meeting aimed to discuss the submitted abstract proposals, which were solicited through a Call for Papers and submissions by invited scholars. The convened academics and experts from various multi-disciplinary backgrounds discussed issues related to global Islamophobia beyond the question of war on terror and fear and hatred of Islam and Muslims post 9/11.The conversation was initiated by Anne Norton, who argued that despite Western political thought relying upon Muslim philosophy, it was often figured only as an allusive erasure in portrayals of the canonical. The palimpsest formed by this layering of influences and erasures conceals and reveals the place of Muslim thought, philosophical and religious, in Western religion and philosophy. The objective of the paper will work to articulate the constitutive effects of this palimpsest. Along with the sequestration of Muslim thought in politics and philosophy, the paper will show how the West bounded and confined aspects of its own intellectual inquiries. Norton will diagnose the effects of an Enlightenment settlement that foreclosed both a full engagement with thinking about the divine in the West.Salman Sayyid shifted the discussion to the question of the emergence of the Islamophobic State. He argued that there was a need to broaden the geography and deepen the history to understand Islamophobia. The term is often understood as a problem that applies to Muslim minorities but not to Muslim majority states. The emergence of an Islamophobic state, which is a specific form of state, has a distinct ensemble of institutions and administrative processes and covers an astonishing range of political forms. The Islamophobic State not only targets expressions of Muslimness but in its efforts to discipline the Muslims, builds up an internationally sanctioned system of surveillance and restriction, which can be easily applied to other social actors. The paper will aim to explain this emergence of the Islamophobic State as a project to rewrite social contracts and transform relations between the ruled and the rulers. The question of self-determination in relation to Islamophobia in Indian-Occupied Kashmir was raised by Hafsa Kanjwal. She stated that the development of Islamophobia in India is a combined result of both secular-liberal and Hindutva ideologies. While secularism is used in India to forcibly depoliticize Muslim identity, Hindutva views Muslims as being subservient to the Hindu identity of the nation. Using the example of Occupied Kashmir, the paper will look at how the relevance of Islam is dismissed as a category for the modern state and how the state attempts to subvert Muslim agency and self-determination. The main argument made was that the essential character of Indian nationalism is Islamophobic, which not only erases Muslim markers in public sites and normalizes violence and bigotry toward Muslims, but also views the Muslim demand for sovereignty or self-determination with suspicion and as a rejection of the liberal secular nation-state order.Shereen Fernandez then directed the conversion to examine the sea as a site for practices of Islamophobia. She argued that there is a gap in the literature that neglects to examine how the sea has been used as a space to practice Islamophobia. To fill this gap, her paper will look at the historical practices of transporting Muslim prisoners, by the British in the 1850s, to a penal colony in the Andaman Islands on a ship and study their experiences as colonial convicts. The latter part of the paper will link this history to the Islamophobia experienced by detainees at Guantánamo Bay (GTMO) during the War on Terror post 9/11. With this contribution, Fernandez aims to explore the centrality of the sea as a site which perpetuates the spatialization of Islamophobia as exemplified in the treatment of Muslim prisoners.Oli Charbonneau’s discussion examined the role of Islam and manifestations of Islamophobia in the Colonial Philippines from 1899 to the 1920s. He argued that prejudicial thinking about Muslims in the region is the result of several discourses. These resulted in systematic control over the Muslim population via militarized violence and cultural-political overhaul. Charbonneau’s paper will aim to study the archival materials from U.S. foreign relations, Philippine Studies; and Islamic Southeast Asian Studies to illustrate the contemporary American ideas about and actions towards Islamic societies. Using Southern Philippines as a case study Charbonneau will also aim to present Islamophobia in Southeast Asia as a set of beliefs rather than a uniform practice.Valentin Duquet led the discussion on Islamophobia in “Algerianist” settler colonial literature which came out in the first half of the 1900s. During this era, Algeria was a region of the French Republic. Analyzing three “pied-noir” novels of the Interwar period as historical archives, his paper will examine the representation of the Muslim native, which Duquet explains is key to understanding Islamophobia under French colonialism as well as its brutal unwinding a few decades later. In these novels, the Muslim figures are often relegated to the background, erased, or replaced with “Berber” characters which are often Christian, pagan, or vaguely Mediterranean. This erasure, he argues, is symptomatic of the symbolic violence of French assimilation which denied even the name “Algerian” from Maghrebi Muslims.Ali Alsmadi discussed the role of Spanish Islam and highlighted the treatment of the Moriscos’ literature in the scholarship. Alsmadi argued that Islam is viewed by the orientalist scholars as an imported religion and not part of indigenous Spanish culture and heritage. In his paper, Alsmadi will shed light on the current political denial to recognize the Moriscos’ language and literature which is deeply rooted in past practices. His analysis will demonstrate how the 19th and 20th-century scholarship and its understanding of the Moriscos were biased and show literary and cultural linkages between Morisco literature and contemporary Spanish authors that reflect cross-religious influences that are unique to the Iberian Peninsula.First Oruc then shifted the focus of the discussion to Islamophobia in Turkey and the fear of Islam in the Turkish Republican era. Oruc narrated that after the demise of the Ottoman Empire, the Kemalist founding elites and the Turkish intelligentsia claimed Islam to be a “spiritual malaise” from which the Turkish nation had to recover. Their concept of modern Turkey envisioned the adoption of Westernizing state nationalism. The Ottoman era was viewed as the repression of the Turk and Turkish cultural values, with Islam seen as the main threat to Turkey’s emergence as a modern republic state. Through examining Turkish cultural and literary texts Oruc aims to explore the historical manifestation of fear of Islam and its aftermaths in Turkey and also examine how some of the similar paradigms of Islamophobia may reoccur in other Muslim majority societies.Thomas Simsarian Dolan addressed the question of “Arab Money” and Global capitalism. Dolan argued that in the selective economic discourse, Muslims are seen as non-normative economic actors. This form of Islamophobia, Dolan stated, builds on Orientalist theory that deepened during the Cold War, and labels Muslims as a security threat to the Western financial system in need of economic and political discipline. Adding to the existing work of scholars such as Deepa Kumar, Moustafa Bayoumi, and Mahmood Mamdani, Dolan and his co-author Zaynab Quadri aim to explore this strand of Islamophobia by tracing the transnational political economies in which both the flow of global capital and people are simultaneously curtailed.

Muneeza Rizvi highlighted contestations over the Palestinian struggle being characterized as an “Islamic issue.” She focused on voices that, on one hand, are critical of the orientalist accounts that portray the creation of Israel as a feud between Muslims and Jews, and on the other, suggest that the designation “Islamic” necessarily excludes other analytical framings of the issue, such as settler colonialism. Rizvi argued that secular assumptions about politics and religion structure these colloquial debates, as well as parallel academic trajectories within Middle East Studies.Farid Hafez directed the discussion toward the geopolitics of Islamophobia and stated that the notion of political Islam has been used by centrist governments in Europe to exclude Muslims from the public sphere, silence critical voices, and crack down on Muslim communities. This discourse is an extension of the narrative on countering extremism and the global war on terror. Hafez aims to study how attempts to silence Muslims transcends beyond the West. Using a geopolitical lens, he will look into UAE’s attempts to shape the discourse on domesticating Muslims in Europe and US and into pro-Israeli interest in cracking down on Muslim political agency in the West. He will try to draw linkages and differences between these practices and Islamophobia in Europe.Abdullah Arian shared Sanober Umar’s thoughts on race-making and religion in colonial and post-colonial India. The participants were encouraged to deliberate over issues such as; prevailing colonial attitudes towards Islam in India, the use of religion to differentiate between Hindus and Muslims as separate “races” and the viewing of Muslims as being dangerous and barbaric compared to Hindus who could be co-opted into the British colonial system.The participants will take the constructive feedback their abstracts received and begin writing draft papers, which will be circulated among the group before the second working group meeting. At the subsequent meeting, scholars will critique each other’s papers and provide in-depth commentary.

To view the working group agenda, click here

To read the participants’ biographies, click here

Read more about this research initiative

Participants and Discussants:

Abdullah Al-Arian, Georgetown University in Qatar

Ali Alsmadi, Indiana University Bloomington, US

Zahra Babar, CIRS – Georgetown University in Qatar

Misba Bhatti, CIRS – Georgetown University in Qatar

Oli Charbonneau, University of Glasgow

Thomas Simsarian Dolan, American University in Cairo

Valentin Duquetis, University of Texas at Austin

Shereen Fernandez, London School of Economics and Political Science

Farid Hafez, Georgetown University

Hafsa Kanjwalis, Lafayette College

Suzi Mirgani, CIRS – Georgetown University in Qatar

Anne Norton, University of Pennsylvania

Firat Oruc, Georgetown University in Qatar

Zaynab Quadri, Ohio State University

Muneeza Rizvi, University of California, Berkeley

Salman Sayyid, University of Leeds

Sanober Umar, York University

Elizabeth Wanucha, CIRS – Georgetown University Qatar

Karine Walther, Georgetown University in Qatar

Clyde Wilcox, Georgetown University in Qatar

Article by Misba Bhatti, Research Analyst at CIRS

CURA Workshop: Writing Women into Wikipedia: Information Creation and Peer Review
2022-08-11 13:00 - 2022-08-18 15:00 (Europe/Moscow) | Education City, Al Luqta St, Ar-Rayyan, Doha, Qatar
On August 11 and 18, 2022, CIRS hosted a two-part workshop for undergraduate students titled, “Writing Women into Wikipedia: Information Creation and Peer Review.” The workshop was offered under the CIRS Undergraduate Research Advancement (CURA) Program, and was co-led by GU-Q Faculty Professor Phoebe Musandu, and Paschalia Terzi, GU-Q Librarian.

This workshop taught me to create and edit the websites, but also learn to respect other works as well by giving valuable and reasonable feedback while making the necessary edits/suggestions. Throughout this process, I got to further develop my research skills, especially when you need to find out an information about someone who is not well known in online platforms when you try researching in English.
– Nafisa Sagdullaeva, GU-Q Class of 2026

Over the course of two days, 15 Georgetown University in Qatar and Northwestern University in Qatar students learned about the information creation and peer review process using Wikipedia articles as a model. The workshop was adapted by Terzi from a recent project report published in the Journal of Information Literacy (Thomas, Jones & Mattingly, 2021). Professor Musandu opened the workshop with a presentation contextualizing the themes and goals of the workshop in the bigger picture of the bias that is presented in Wikipedia. Her presentation highlighted the importance of analyzing information sources to determine whose voices are represented, and whose are being left out.

Wikipedia is an online encyclopedia that relies on a community of editors to create, revise, and remove articles from the website based on Wikipedia’s policies and guidelines. It is a common misperception that anyone can write or edit anything on Wikipedia at any time without oversight. While this is true to an extent, what is often not known is that every article and edit is reviewed by experienced Wikipedia editors who will remove the edits or article itself if found to be outside of Wikipedia’s policies and guidelines. Information presented in Wikipedia articles should be from a neutral point of view, verifiable, and not original research.

Professor Musandu explained how bias enters into Wikipedia – evidenced not only in the authors and subjects of articles, but also within the community of editors. Since Wikipedia’s guidelines require all information in articles to be verifiable, only secondary sources may be used to source articles. Professor Musandu explained why this can be an issue – authors of secondary sources may insert their own biases into their work, which is then replicated in the Wikipedia article. Secondary sources reflect the social norms, mores, and values that were evident at the time of writing, thus perpetuating the biases through generations.

I learnt how I can critically review the articles posted on Wikipedia, and post my own and ultimately become a Wikipedian.
– Zarrish Ahmed, GU-Q Class of 2026

In this workshop, students focused on the underrepresentation of women in the world of Wikipedia. Regarding the content of Wikipedia itself, women are underrepresented in articles. Within articles themselves, how women are represented is often very narrow and reduced to their role in relationship to a male, or relegated to matters of social and purely feminine affairs, advancing unhelpful stereotypes. For example, in the Wikipedia article “Women in Qatar,” the first sentence is “Women’s rights in Qatar are restricted by the country’s male guardianship law and influenced by the Wahhabi interpretation of Islam” (Wikipedia, 2022).

Women are also underrepresented in the community of Wikipedia editors. In addition to the fewer number of women editors, Shane-Simpson and Gillespie-Lynch (2017) suggest five reasons for the gender gap, including the inclination of women to discuss more and edit content less, perception and interaction with other editors, and gender issues in quantity of leisure time available. This is why the workshop focused specifically on women and Wikipedia. It is the hope of the facilitators that students will choose to become Wikipedia editors themselves.

After the presentation, students worked in groups to write articles about Qatari women in the fields of politics, science, education, art, and business. During the second session on August 18, the facilitators gave each group the article of another group in an anonymous manner to review in a peer review exercise. At the end of the two-part Workshop, students had the opportunity to publish their articles and engage with the global community of Wikipedia editors on their biographical contributions. As Anupa Khanal, GU-Q class of 2026 stated after the workshop, “I would like to devote more time on writing articles on women who are unrepresented and also work on peer reviews.”

Watch a video of the presentation by Professor Phoebe Musandu and Paschalia Terzi here.

Article by Elizabeth Wanucha, CIRS Operations Manager
