Energy Pedagogies

Session Submission Type: Paper Session: Traditional Format

Abstract

This panel explores how three energy forms—oil, coal, and nuclear power—are conjured and imagined within contemporary U.S. visual culture. It proceeds from two related premises: that visual representations help determine how we make sense of energy regimes, and that these representations elide the violence embedded within these same regimes and foreclose alternatives to petro-capitalism. Each of the papers explores how one media form (the graph, reality television, and documentary film) attempts to educate or “school” viewers about a particular energy source.

In his paper, Caleb Wellum (University of Toronto) explores the emergence of the graph as the primary “pedagogical technology” for understanding and representing oil and carbon capitalism. The popularity of the graph, he argues, can be traced to its efficiency at representing a commodity that remains hidden from view (even as oil saturates daily life). Yet Wellum argues that graphs conceal as much as they capture: by reducing the contemporary debate about oil to questions about quantity (e.g. how much is left and how long will it last?), graphs suggest that the solutions to contemporary petro-capitalist crises are technocratic rather than political, and they inhibit attempts to think through life after oil.

The second paper, presented by Bob Johnson (National University), offers a critique of the 2011 reality television series Coal: Danger Runs Deep as a way of examining the place of coal within the contemporary neoliberal imaginary. While many imagine that coal is a relic from an earlier time, Johnson points out, the peak year of U.S. coal production was 2009. The ten-episode Coal series promised viewers an unadulterated window into the world of Appalachian coal mining, but Johnson contends that reality television, along with other mainstream media forms, erase the material and ecological structures of exploitation and stratification that have been embedded in the fossil economy since the nineteenth century and that continue to prevail today.

In the final paper, Natasha Zaretsky (Southern Illinois University) explores the visual and affective strategies of Pandora’s Promise, a 2013 feature-length documentary that advocated for nuclear power as necessary in the coming battle against runaway climate change. Zaretsky argues that the film attempts to persuade viewers to embrace nuclear power as a safe, clean energy source by charting the story of environmentalists who once opposed nuclear power but who have been gradually converted to a pro-nuclear position. At the same time, the film attempts to discipline its audience by suggesting that it is extreme emotions (such as panic and fear) that are the largest impediment to any nuclear revival. In her paper, Zaretsky argues that this attention to emotional management has deep roots in the early Cold War but has become more powerful in the neo-liberal, post-Cold War era.

Taken together, all three of the papers explore the role of visual culture within the contemporary energy imaginary—what gets represented, what gets excised, which futures are forecasted, and which are foreclosed.

Sub Unit

• American Studies Association Annual Meeting

Chair

• TBD (Unassigned)

Individual Presentations

• As Shown on the Graph: How Graphs Shape Oil Futures - Caleb Wellum, University of Toronto, Canada

• Coal TV: The Hyper-real Mineral Frontier - Bob Johnson, National University

• Nuclear Energy and Emotional Containment in Pandora’s Promise - Natasha Zaretsky, Southern Illinois University