Resilience Roundtable: Collaborative Communities for Energy Justice

This talk surveys ten collaborative communities from around the globe that form the Intersecting Energy Cultures (IEC) Working Group, convened by the Penn Program in Environmental Humanities founding director, Dr. Bethany Wiggin, and Dr. Rebecca Macklin at the University of Aberdeen.

The IEC working group brings together researchers working with community-based partners to develop deeper understanding of the varied and uneven impacts stemming from the international workings of energy industries. It considers how communities become caught in the middle of multiple and historically overlapping forms of energy production, often amplifying existing social and economic vulnerabilities.

Developed through the experimental rubric of environmental humanities, the working group explores the ways that arts-driven and humanistic methods of inquiry enable us to carry out meaningful community-based, participatory research around historic, contemporary and future relations with sites of energy production. Drawing on the project’s preliminary findings, we will consider questions fundamental to fostering and maintaining research partnerships beyond university settings:  How can these partnerships be mutually beneficial?  What methods facilitate cross-sector, transdisciplinary inquiry? What kinds of project outcomes are possible and desirable?

Part of the Planet Texas 2050 Resilience Roundtable series,
Academic-Community Partnerships for Adaptation and Resilience.