Nov 15, 2018: A New Beginning
I’m back.
Last year on November 1, 2017 I started an action-a-day durational practice. It lasted for almost two month. This November (2018), I’m beginning again: this time, adding another month to this durational practice. So, you’ll be able to catch me here online 5 out of 7 days a week for the next three months. The research aim for this project, titled Deep Energy Literacy, is to think through energy transition through a feminist and decolonial lens.
Methodologically, it mobilizes creative reflection in the form of writing, audio documenting, visually recording (photography and moving image) research-creation practices to attune myself to feminist and decolonial methods for approaching energy transition. Earlier in my career, when I began studying this topic, I was consistently misunderstood and invited to join projects if I was willing, for example, to study women working in the oil industry. While this is important work, for someone, it is not my interest or my focus.
Instead, I aim to explore what feminist and decolonial politics might bring to energy transition, energy justice, and climate justice movements. And, of course, I’m interested in highlighting the often invisible work that women are playing on the front lines of these movements, but more importantly I’m always thinking about how to disrupt patriarchal, colonial, capitalist inequities in the present and to do this I’m mobilizing feminist anti-capitalist decolonial methods and politics to think differently and to live differently in relationship to my work and my world.
My colleague Natalie Loveless (also running her own action a day project as part of Just Powers) explains her own research project Sensing the Anthropocene, this way: to paraphrase, she says that she is interested in exploring not just art on ecology but ecological art, as form.
Along these same lines, I am interested in moving through the next three months, further deepening my own understanding about what it means, not to study energy transition and women, or energy transition and indigenous communities, but to seriously explore feminist and decolonial energy transition as a way of thinking with and through the current moment.
If this isn’t quite clear in this inaugural write-up for day one year two, then my aim is that over the next 92 days to clarify for myself, using this research-creation durational art practice, and for my readers, what it means to think energy transition differently—feminist and decolonial as form and not merely content.