CFP: KCE 2017. Making Energy Futures: Tools and Practices Constructing the Long-Term

Dear colleagues,

We invite you to submit papers and other non-standard interventions (videos, performances, artwork) to our panel on Making Energy Futures at the Knowledge/Culture/Ecologies 2017 conference in Santiago, Chile. Submission deadline is 26 May, 2017.

With usual apologies for cross-postings and best regards,

Olivier Ejderyan & Carla Alvial Palavicino

Call for Papers

Making Energy Futures: Tools and Practices Constructing the Long-Term (Panel 29)

Knowledge/Culture/Ecologies International Conference

November 15-18, 2017 - Universidad Diego Portales, Santiago - Chile.

http://knowledgeculture.org

Convenors

Olivier Ejderyan olivier.ejderyan@usys.ethz.ch (TdLab, ETH Zurich)

Carla Alvial Palavicino carla.alvial@gmail.com (NUMIES, Universidad Diego Portales)

This panel seeks to discuss the role of promises, expectations and practices associated to long-term energy futures, particularly their role in technoscientific regimes and their contestations. Decarbonizing energy production and consumption is framed as a key challenge for a transition towards sustainable socio-ecological systems. It implies envisioning future energy technologies, policies and practices that can either pave the way for or result from such a transition. While this focus on the long term is not new, its methods, practices and forms of decision-making, have evolved. These novel future-oriented practices and methods contribute to perform the future of energy: they shape the conditions under which particular socio-technical configurations emerge. A characteristic of discussions about energy futures is their explicit focus on the long-term. Depicting an idealized future brought into being by a new technology has been a key strategy for promoting technologies for the long-term. However, increased support for technological innovation via competitive funding through markets or public research agencies has also led to an increase of “promising” to secure such funding. Thus, the future becomes increasingly instrumentalized within technoscientific regimes, leading to hype/deception cycles, such as in the case of fuel cells or nuclear fusion. At the same time, there are increasing efforts to reflect on energy futures by including publics in the formulation and evaluation of energy futures. These trends highlight the possibility of different paths to enact sustainable energy transitions.

Against this background, this panel is interested in empirical and theoretical contributions that discuss:

• past, present and future forms of making sense of energy futures. How has the way energy futures are described, framed and communicated changed over time?
• how future-making practices structure decision-making by legitimizing or excluding specific actors or by establishing routines and path dependencies;
• the performativity of tools, methods and practices to understand energy futures, that is, how these tools shape present realities
• alternatives to centralized energy futures and their expectations (distributed generation, off grid systems, autarkic energy communities).

We invite papers, and other non-standard interventions, to inquire about the constructions of the long term.

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The call for papers and media work closes 26 May, 2017. For further details, please contact us at olivier.ejderyan@usys.ethz.ch & carla.alvial@gmail.com Or submit directly via the online submission form.