Abstrakt
Current climate crisis and the inadequacy of energy transition fuel a new impetus to transform a masculinist techno-literacy into alternative propositions of ‘deep energy literacy’ (Wilson 2022), or, within an emerging elemental turn, of activating the radiant potential of the sun for seeking out energy justice or ‘solarity’ (Szeman and Barney 2021). While such proposals appear removed from everyday realities, there is a lack of attention to what kind of energy subjects and literacies are already emerging that unsettle boundaries between the human and the environment, the body and technology. This presentation turns to fieldwork and participatory photography with Czech solar micro-producers, renewable industry representatives and those who live around large solar plantations in the Czech lands to trace mixed and differential literacies (Haraway 1997) ‘where each new attainment of literacy introduces difference in what counts as literacy’ (Colebrook 2012). Encounters for these literacies and their attendant ethos include the surges of joy in being touched by readings of solar generated electricity on the solar monitoring app; the thermoception of ‘plantation heat’ or rising ambient temperature around the solar farm; and the unexpected and uncertain spectral flashes of nuclear radiation and electromagnetic interferences at home. Drawing on the frame of technoecologoies the analysis focuses not only what these visceral sensory engagements bring together, but also what is left out or disarticulated in specific encounters but can be seen as productive “limits” that entail immanent possibilities for rethinking proposals for community energy.
Bio
Dagmar Lorenz-Meyer is Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Humanities, Charles University where she teaches in the Graduate Programme in Gender Studies. Her research emerges at the intersection of corporeal feminisms, technoscience studies and new materialism, currently in relation to solar energy, corporeal solidarity, and Romani cooking. She recently co-edited the Special Issue ‘Climate Action: Transforming Infrastructures, Cultivating Attentiveness, Practicing Solidarity’ (Sociální studia/Social Studies 2022), and works on a Romani Cookbook for a Liveable Climate. She serves as section co-editor of the journal Matter: Journal of New Materialist Research.