Cultures of Energy

This week it's our end of year special edition of the Cultures of Energy podcast. Dominic and Cymene discusses a couple of energy news stories from 2018, Dominic apparently says Permian "basement" instead of "basin," and they share heartwarming resolutions for 2019 including doing more yoga in the desert with children. Then (18:55) our search for a holiday movie that somehow thematizes climate cha...

Cymene and Dominic wonder whether there's a holiday film out there that also addresses Anthropocene issues and wonder whether the Grinch was actually woke to climate change. Then (12:40) we welcome our good friend Rhys Williams, from the University of Glasgow, to the podcast to talk to us about the emerging genre of solarpunk fiction. We start with the basics: what solarpunk is, what its origins a...

Dominic and Cymene wonder whether there isn't some way to make the academic job market experience slightly less spirit-killing on this week's podcast. Then (14:36) we are most fortunate to get U Michigan anthropologist Jason De León ( http://undocumentedmigrationproject.com ) on the phone to talk about his book The Land of Open Graves: Living and Dying on the Migrant Trail (U California Press 2015...

Dominic and Cymene talk about gloomy climate news and dogs that can judge the goodness in human souls on this week's podcast. Then (19:16) we catch up with environmental artist Maria Whiteman at her residency at the Environmental Resilience Institute at Indiana University. We engage several of her art projects from the past decade and talk about touching as a way of remembering, what fascinates he...

Cymene and Dominic rediscover the Violent Femmes on this week's podcast and that prompts a discussion of the best albums of all time. We then (18:54) welcome American U's Evan Berry to the podcast, author of Devoted to Nature: The Religious Roots of American Environmentalism  (U California Press, 2015) and the PI of a Luce Foundation funded project on "Religion and Climate Change in Cross-Regional...

Dominic and Cymene talk urban turkey encounters on this week's edition of the Cultures of Energy podcast. With multispecies on our minds, we then (8:59) check in with Dartmouth's Laura Ogden. We begin with her experience growing up in the Everglades and how it sparked a life long interest in multispecies relations and the hidden histories of landscapes often regarded as "wilderness." We touch on h...

California is burning again. So, in solidarity, Cymene and Dominic try to do an intro segment with N95 masks on and quickly realize this isn't a good way to have to live. To learn more about the evolving field of wildfire management we then (13:40) chat with the amazing Adriana Petryna from U Penn. First we ask how a nice anthropologist like her became famous for studying disasters like Chernobyl....

Cymene and Dominic get their mojo back as they dip their toes into the blue wave. Then (13:12) we connect with Anne Galloway about her life and work as a scholar and a farmer. We start with Anne's thoughts on how raising sheep as a farmer has made her part of a flock and how the complexity of those relations have changed how she thinks about the Anthropocene, in particular about death. Anne answer...

Cymene and Dominic recap their Halloween on this week's episode of the podcast and plug the spooky new Cultural Anthropology series, "Time of Monsters," ( https://culanth.org/fieldsights/1584-time-of-monsters ). Then (15:59) with many eyes on next week's U.S. midterm election, Paige West joins us in the studio to process the social and environmental stakes of our contemporary political situation....

Dominic tries to sing Ted Cruz out of office on this week's podcast and retells a story about the senator's dirty shirt. Then (14:59) fellow anthropologist and environmental humanities podcaster Tim Neale (of Deakin University) joins us from the future in Melbourne. With him we review their very successful recent Anthropocene Campus and its effort to think deep thoughts and deep time through the l...

Dominic and Cymene talk foot injuries, bears, and a project called "smell my box." We then (15:52) welcome to the podcast the marvelous Caroline Jones from MIT who talks about her amazing research and curatorial work on bioart, biofiction, psychology, phenomenology, neuroscience and much much more. We start with her provocative concept of "symbiontics" which points toward a change of human conscio...

We get to hear about Cymene's mod years and her experience this week with "cat therapy." And then (14:06) Dominic speaks with Cambridge environmental historian Paul Warde about his new book, The Invention of Sustainability: Nature and Destiny, ca. 1500-1870 (Cambridge UP 2018) which traces our contemporary interest in sustainable futures back to the concerns and inventions of early modern politics...

Dominic and Cymene talk about the country's first robot sex brothel coming to Houston. And then (14:40) we welcome the amazing Cara Daggett to the podcast. Cara has an amazing book in press with Duke that everyone should pre-order. It's entitled The Birth of Energy: Fossil Fuels, Thermodynamics and the Politics of Work and it describes how the modern conceptualization of the term "energy" only cam...

This week's episode starts with some serious reflections on cracked masculinity, misogyny, 1980s culture, and the Supreme Court. But in the spirit of demanding better worlds to come, we then (15:30) welcome Darin Barney (McGill U) and Imre Szeman (U Waterloo) to talk through how best to imagine and enact positive solar futures. We start with their planning for After Oil 2: Solarity, a conference t...

Cymene and Dominic debate whether dogs can have bullshit jobs on this week's podcast. Then (13:46) we are most fortunate to welcome NYU's Rosalind Fredericks to the podcast to talk about her brand new book, Garbage Citizenship: Vital Infrastructures of Labor in Dakar, Senegal  (Duke U Press). But before getting there we ask Rozy why she thinks garbage/waste/discard studies are becoming so popular...

Cymene and Dominic answer the timeless surrealist question, can raisins function as bait, on this week's podcast. We then (9:20) welcome to the podcast Scotland's finest son, Graeme Macdonald (currently on loan to Warwick) who explains first of all that he had nothing to do with the making of couscous sandwiches at Petrocultures 2018. But he does cop to enjoying very much working together with Jan...

On this week's podcast, Cymene and Dominic recap their time at the marvelous Petrocultures 2018 event in Glasgow and tell tales of adventures with quinoa sandwiches and Buckfast, a curious liquor better known locally as "stab-yer-pal." Then (13:25) we offer another edition of our Soylent Rainbow segment, talking classic ecofilms that you've recommended to us. This time it's Alex Rivera's 2008 cult...

Dominic and Cymene report from Scotland where they have arrived for what looks to be an amazing Petrocultures 2018 event. Some talk of haggis and whiskey follows. But it's also the anniversary of Hurricane Harvey back in Houston and to process how we feel about that (11:07) we invite our dear colleague, Lacy M. Johnson ( http://www.lacymjohnson.com ) into THE STUDIO to talk about where we find our...

Cymene and Dominic chat about the Wizard of Oz, unglacier tours, rocket toilets and motorized scooters to lead off this week's podcast. Then (12:37) we are most fortunate to have the chance to talk about art and the Anthropocene with celebrated artist Judit Hersko ( http://www.judithersko.com ) who represented her native Hungary at the Venice Biennale in 1997. We talk about her earliest work about...

Dominic and Cymene bask in 15 seconds of Icelandic limelight and discuss Madonna@60.  Then (14:28) to celebrate the premiere of our film, "Not Ok: A Little Movie About a Small Glacier at the End of the World," we whet your appetite with the full interview with brilliant Icelandic writer and filmmaker Andri Snaer Magnason—author of Dreamland (Citizen Press, 2006) and The Story of the Blue Planet (S...

Cymene and Dominic check in from Iceland on this week's edition of the podcast and talk about the virtues of the Icelandic horse. Then (12:36) we welcome dear friend and horsexpert John Hartigan back to the podcast. We've come a long way since Episode 4 but it turns out John has been keeping pretty busy too. We start off with his new book, Care of the Species (U Minnesota Press, 2017) about human-...

We start this week's double episode on climate science and climate policy with ruminations on Trumpian arguments against fuel efficiency, Europe breaking its heat record, and what in retrospect were the breakthrough technological achievements of the 1970s—the Ronco inside the egg shell egg scrambler and the Popeil pocket fisherman. Then (14:04) we chat with star climate scientist Michael E. Mann....

Your cohosts discuss what sensory technologies they might wish for their own home and the kind of multispecies encounters Cymene might have had in a Tegucigalpa red light district hotel (trigger warning: there be cockroach stories ahead!) Then (20:29) we chat with the multitalented Jennifer Gabrys from Goldsmiths ( https://www.jennifergabrys.net ), author most recently of Program Earth (U Minnesot...

Cymene and Dominic talk surprising energy trends and how to make news more fun with games. Then (15:05) we talk with the marvelous Christina Cogdell from UC-Davis about her fascinating soon-to-be-published book, Toward a Living Architecture? Complexism and Biology in Generative Design (U Minnesota Press, https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/toward-a-living-architecture ). We talk about h...

Dominic and Cymene react to the new CENHS podcast studio and share a tale of robot sushi misadventure. Then (15:02) we welcome Leo Coleman (Hunter College) to the program and get right into his new book, A Moral Technology: Electrification as Political Ritual in New Delhi (Cornell U Press, 2017) and its exploration of the political and moral history of electricity in India since the early 20th cen...