Energy and labour: Thinking across the continuum

Abstract

Metabolisms of energy in society and space are predicated upon human labour, in ways that are often poorly recognized in relation to the global climate challenge. I synthesize and interrogate existing scholarship on the relationship between energy and labour across different spatio-temporal contexts, so as to reveal the overlapping networks that bind energy workers, consumers and producers. Drawing upon geographical, feminist, social practice and political ecology insights, I propose a research agenda that foregrounds the role of social reproduction – through capital-labour regimes and the gendered division of labour – in shaping the circulation and contestation of energy use.

Socio-ecological precarity at the juncture of multiple crises

“…She calls for precarity research to unpack the symbioses and struggles that arise as a result among interactions between humans and their nonhuman counterparts. This also strengthens the need for unveiling the precarious infrastructures of care (Bouzarovski, 2022;Lopes et al, 2018) and their articulation across hybrid socio-natural settings.…”

Climate justice in higher education: a proposed paradigm shift towards a transformative role for colleges and universities

“…However, higher education cannot claim to have achieved climate justice or be working toward a just transition without essential components of climate justice including healthy working conditions, fair, livable pay, and benefits for all people working on campus (Ayele 2020 ; Gunn-Wright and Hockett 2019 ). A climate just future necessarily will feature different modalities and dynamics of labor than those associated with the extractive past (Bouzarovski 2022 ). People of color, women, and people from other marginalized groups are more likely to earn poverty-level wages, a vicious cycle that reduces future opportunities for economic security and harms mental and physical health (Cooper 2018 ; Pillay-van Wyk and Bradshaw 2017 ).…”

Rent and financialisation as concrete totality: The case for provisioning approaches as method of abstraction

“…Use of the systems approach to investigate consumption has focused mainly on food (Fine, 1998;Fine, et al 1995) and to a lesser extent fashion (Brooks, 2015). More recently, the approach has been used to explore questions beyond consumption as such, in particular financialisation (Bayliss and Fine, 2021;Bayliss et al, 2017;Santos and Principe, 2020) and sustainability (Bouzarovski, 2022;Fanning et al, 2020;Pirgmaier and Steinberger, 2019). A corollary of this is application of the approach to a wider set of goods, including infrastructure (Brown and Robertson, 2014), energy (Bayliss and Pollen, 2021;Vezzoni, 2023), water (Bayliss et al, 2020) and rail (Haines-Doran, 2022).…”