Energy Transitions in Long Modernity (Day 1)
Fri 4/25/2025 • 9AM - 12PM PDT
This conference will be held via Zoom. Please visit our website for the list of speakers, program schedule and to register. Organized by Robert N. Watson (University of California, Los Angeles), Tiffany Jo Werth (University of California, Davis), and Todd Borlik (Purdue University).California boasts itself as a hub for transitioning energy from fossil fuels to renewable sources such as wind, water, and solar power. Taking this local, contemporary perspective as its departure point, this conference looks to the past and a deep history of energy transitions (and additions) in order to better understand how to negotiate this switch. We will convene scholars around the topics of “energy,” “extraction,” and “exploitation,” in the period we are calling “long modernity” (16th–21st century). This conference brings together diverse disciplines to unpack the complex dynamics that accompany energy regime change as expressed by technological development and represented in creative media that span the centuries of long modernity and that connect the local to the global, the past to the present. We seek to understand how an energy transition might conserve, rather than ravage, the environment and species by understanding how energy infrastructures affect earth and its ecosystems.