Cultures of Energy

Cymene and Dominic lament what is happening in Iran and explore what kinds of dogs they would be on this episode of the podcast. Then (15:47) we welcome to the podcast the amazing multitalented multimedia artist Zina Saro-Wiwa to talk about her work. We begin with her father Ken Saro-Wiwa's courageous activism on behalf of the Ogoni people and tragic death at the hands of Nigeria's Abacha dictatorship. We then talk about her career in journalism and how coming to terms with the past eventually propelled her toward art. We turn from there to her creative practice. Zina explains to us what she means by "deep listening", why she finds Ogoni traditions of masquerade so generative to create with and how art is an angel with many eyes. We close talking about what it takes to hear the voice of oil and the many projects Zina has now collected under the mantle of her new Mangrove Arts Foundation. Check out Zina/SIRA*'s new album Songs for the End of the World here (a taste of it can also be found in this episode's outro music). And if finances allow, please consider making a donation or contributing to a Go Fund Me campaign to help Zina to create a museum in honor of her father's life and creativity. We just did! Hang in there, everyone, peace and love.

Dominic and Cymene celebrate the 250th episode of the podcast with tales of steamy avian encounter. And then (16:14) we welcome Nikki Luke to the podcast, author of the brand-new book Electric Life: Utility Regulation and the Fight for Energy Democracy (MIT Press, 2026). We start with what energy democracy means to Nikki in the context of her work on utility regulation and then move to her case study of the famously recalcitrant utility, Georgia Power, and how the history of electricity in the American South has long been entangled with white supremacist politics. We talk about the politics of setting electricity rates, how and why investor-owned utilities undermine energy transition, and the intensifying grid politics of data centers. We touch on the poverty of imagination that electrical utilities so often display and then close with a discussion of what Nikki's analytics of feminist urban political ecology reveal about the quotidian labors involved in keeping the lights on. Check out your co-hosts at SXSW on a panel with Fire of Love and Time and Water director Sara Dosa (Friday, March 13, 530p-630p, 304 E 3rd Texas House, Austin) and Cymene's presentation on elemental attentions to the History of Consciousness program at UC Santa Cruz (Monday, March 9, 1p). More details here! Hang in there, everyone, peace and love.

Dominic and Cymene talk about their Cathostant (or is it Protelic?) families in this week's intro segment. And then (11:59) we are thrilled to be joined by Jennifer Mae Hamilton and Astrida Neimanis to discuss their work as the Weathering Collective, especially their inspiring new book How to Weather Together: Feminist Practice for Climate Change (Bloomsbury, 2026). We begin with their collaborative relationship, how it began and has evolved over the past decade, and how they learned to balance theory and practice together. We discuss how both climate science and feminist theory are best considered as works in progress and then turn to weather and why its capacity to attune to constant change helps us to grapple with the larger existential challenges of the climate crisis. From there, we talk about their concept of weathering as the ability to redistribute shelter and vulnerability in a climate changing world in ways that run counter to settler colonial legacies. Finally, we turn toward why they are happy to be ecofeminist again, how weathering meets undercommoning and how to cultivate and practice 'low stakes vulnerability' through games. Check out Jen's blog here and a recent publication here. Also stop by the FEELed Lab for a visit. Hang in there, everyone, peace and love.

David Pontille, researcher of maintenance practices, and Jérôme Denis, scholar of fragility and the care of things, join to discuss their new books. They trace how fieldwork with infrastructure crews led them to study fragility, contrast maintenance and repair, explore attention and phenomenology in care work, and frame maintenance as a potential subversive practice in the age of planned obsolescence.

We kick things off this week with a short but heartfelt celebration of the tenth anniversary of the podcast. Several friends—Geoff Bowker, Heather Davis, Imre Szeman, John Grzinich, Karen Pinkus and Tim Morton—drop in to share thoughts about what's urgent to think and feel in energy and environmental humanities these days. Then (34:00) Cymene welcomes lawyer-scholar-activist Nicole Negowetti to speak about her new book, Feeding the Future: Restoring the Planet and Healing Ourselves (Georgtown U Press, 2026) and its spotlight on regenerative food practices and the role that communities worldwide are playing in transforming the global food system. Hang in there, everyone, peace and love.

Happy 2026! It's been quite a year so far and your co-hosts talk about their recent trip to Nicaragua and Shadow's reinvention as a fly assassin. Then (17:18) we welcome Maxime Polleri to the conversation to talk about his fascinating new book Radioactive Governance: The Politics of Revitalization in Post-Fukushima Japan (NYU Press, 2025). We begin with the 2011 Fukushima earthquake, tsunami and nuclear disaster and the role that luck played in preventing 14 core meltdowns instead of the 3 that actually happened. From there, Maxime takes us into the center of his argument about the politics of post-disaster recovery in Japan and the myriad state efforts to downplay the severity of nuclear aftermath in order to encourage its citizens to restart their lives (and reactors). We talk about the long history of efforts to improve the image of nuclear energy, the politics of measuring radiation, state performances of radiation knowledge (including efforts to produce nuclear cuteness), and why it is so hard for some to accept that the Fukushima disaster isn't in the past but rather our future. In closing, we turn to the place of nuclear energy and disasters in the Anthropocene. Can we still speak of disaster events in the heterogeneous toxicity of the Anthropcene?

Neither headcolds nor hangovers will keep your plucky co-hosts from bringing you one more episode for 2025. Since this is supposedly the year of AI, we let ChatGPT create a Year in Review episode structure and ask us questions about energy and environmental matters in 2025. The whole thing goes off the rails pretty quickly, descending into what Cymene calls "technocratic Mad Libs". And then compounding that error, we also invited an AI voice editor program to help edit the episode. That program obviously didn't like our laughter or our banter or the critical things we kept saying about AI. So, prepare yourselves for a weird episode, dear listeners. But what better way is there to honor the disaster that was 2025, right? Peace and love and see you in 2026!! PS and if you want a do-over and experience our Plan B instead, then YouTube has covered: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aF14KznpnKE

In honor of cookie week, your co-hosts tackle an age-old question: are brownies cookies are not? Then we process the fact that next month will be the 10th anniversary of Cultures of Energy (wow!) Thereafter (11:51) we welcome the terrific Jean-Baptiste Fressoz to the podcast to discuss his provocative and fascinating new book More and More and More: An All-Consuming History of Energy (Penguin, 2025) and its core argument that "energy transition" is a fiction. We begin with JB's unease with the dominant historiography of energy and its tendency to focus on change rather than accumulation and move from there to his idea to write a history of energy that forefronted the symbiosis of energy and materials. We turn from there to the idea of energy amputation, how to avoid stage-ist thinking, why escaping carbon will be harder than escaping capitalism, and how the technocratic movement of the early 20th century and atomic science paved the way toward dominant narratives of energy transition and energy futures today. JB explains why he doubts—even as someone who sides with the climate movement—that we're going to escape fossil fuels any time soon. PS If you would like to send in a memory or reflection for our 10th anniversary podcast next month, please email or Wetransfer a 3-5 minute audio file to dcb2@rice.edu. We'd love to hear from you!!

Cymene and Dominic recount a pleasant business trip to New Orleans including a mild bout of Satanic panic. Then (9:10) we are joined by the delightful Chelsea Schields to talk about her recent book, Offshore Attachments: Oil and Intimacy in the Caribbean (U California Press, 2023). We begin with how research in Aruba and Curacao led her to contemplate the ubiquity of oil's presence in the Caribbean and to shine a spotlight on refineries alongside sites of extraction. We talk about how the management of sexuality and desire became key to the organization of oil labor in the region as well as to the protection of middle-class whiteness and its nuclear family model. We discuss the impact of what Chelsea calls "the offshoring of sex" through sex worker recruitment and then turn to the impact of automation on oil labor. Finally, we circle back to what happened after the oil industry went bust in Aruba and Curacao and when the islands became reimagined as energy-intensive tourist paradises. Hang in there, everyone, peace and love.

Dominic and Cymene begin with the war on Chicago and Kelly Hayes's amazing essay, "In Chicago, We Run Toward Danger Together" which everyone should read. Then (15:20) we welcome Javiera Barandiarán to the podcast to talk about her new book, Living Minerals: Nature, Trade, and Power in the Race for Lithium (MIT Press, 2025), and what Javiera loves about the element of lithium. We discuss lithium's futurity and multiplicity, why Javiera thinks it's wrong to think about lithium as a single thing. From there, we talk about lithium's role in nuclear fusion, what rights of nature minerals should enjoy, and why so many people believe minerals create wealth. Then we wrap up with Javiera's other new book this year, a study of the efforts to create a new constitution for Chile, Demanding a Radical Constitution: Environmentalism, Resilience, and Participation in Chile's 2022 Reform Efforts (Palgrave Macmillan, 2025). Please also check out Lithium Landscapes and this article on Chile's energy transition. Hang in there, everyone, peace and love.