Son[i]a #343 Cara New Daggett
- 00:01 We have all the ideas that we need
- 03:15 Intro
- 05:18 Energy, work and utopian post-work demands
- 16:39 Coal democracy and worker movements
- 23:20 Petromasculinity: a reaction to Trump’s election
- 28:52 Petronostalgia y autoritarismo
- 36:38 Climate anxiety in the far-right
- 40:55 Ecomodernism: human life decoupled from Earth
- 47:45 Debts, capitalism and the promise of growth
- 51:44 Degrowth
- 57:54 Freedom as independence and the fear of dependency
- 64:09 Storytelling around energy transition
- 71:08 An agenda for feminist energy systems
- 79:46 Accountability: renewables can be extractive too
- 85:06 Cohousing
Reassessing and defamiliarizing historical narratives that sit at the core of white patriarchal societies, is a necessary feminist practice and one at which Cara Daggett, writer and researcher in the field of energy politics, excels at. Her genealogical approach to energy in “The Birth of Energy” unveils the deep political implications of this steam-born concept, showing how entangled energy is to power and work in today's fossil-fueled imaginaries and why “an energy transition is not just as simple as switching fuel types”.
Currently an assistant professor in the Department of Political Science at Virginia Tech, she coined the word ‘petromasculinity’ in a homonymous article that outlined the historical role of fossil fuels in reinforcing the patriarchal order, channeling climate anxiety through authoritarian desires within the far-right. Cara Daggett is also founding member of The Mayapple Energy Transition Collective, together with her friends and scholars Shannon Bell and Christine Labuski, with whom she thinks of possible human-energy relations for a just energy transition.
In this podcast, energy, work, utopian demands, and unions, become intertwined with oil cultures, petromasculinities and ecomodernism, to reflect on growth, dependency, debt and energy transitions beyond extractivism. Degrowth, desire, pleasure, feminist science and new story-telling strategies are revealed as key ingredients for the recipe to reimagine ecologically generous ways of life on Earth.