Solarities: Seeking Energy Justice

A collective engages and mirrors the critical need for energy justice and transformation
 

Solarities considers the possibilities of organizing societies and economies around solar energy, and the challenges of a just and equitable transition away from fossil fuels. Far from presenting solarity as a utopian solution to the climate crisis, it critically examines the ambiguous potentials of solarities: plural, situated, and often contradictory. 

Here, a diverse collective of activists, scholars, and practitioners critically engage a wide range of relationships and orientations to the sun. They consider the material and infrastructural dimensions of solar power, the decolonial and feminist promises of decentralized energy, solarian relations with more-than-human kin, and the problem of oppressive and weaponized solarities. Solarities imagines—and demands— possibilities for energy justice in this transition.

The After Oil Collective is a subgroup of the Petrocultures Research Group that meets periodically for collaborative work. In 2019, more than seventy international participants across many fields met in Montreal to work on the theme of “solarity.” Solarities is one of the outcomes of this collaborative work.

Ayesha Vemuri is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Art History and Communication Studies at McGill University.

Darin Barney is professor in the Department of Art History and Communication Studies at McGill University, where he holds the Grierson Chair in Communication Studies.