Speculative Energy Futures

Stories about this project:

• Understanding how society will change as we move to renewable energy sources

Speculative Energy Futures is a multi-year, collaborative, and interdisciplinary project on energy transition as a necessary early response to addressing climate change. It brings artistic and humanities researchers together with science, social science, and policy experts to investigate the challenges of energy transition. Together, participants will produce a large-scale, evidence-based exhibition as well as a series of publications, bringing attention to the importance of arts and humanities perspectives on the social and cultural impacts of energy transition, informed by the latest research coming out of the IPCC, Future Energy Systems, and Just Powers. It takes its methodological cue from the recently completed Immune Nations project (also collaborative, research-based, multi-year, and interdisciplinary) funded by the Research Council of Norway and exhibited at the UNAIDS building during the 2017 World Health Assembly. Over the course of the next six years (2017-2023) participants in Speculative Energy Futures will get to know each other, develop self-generated groupings with other participants, research a key issue related to feminist and decolonial energy transition, and develop an arts-based engagement with their chosen topic for a series of high profile exhibitions. Artistic research and dissemination methods are well-suited to capturing dissenting opinions on controversial topics and envisioning new futures that, while based in evidence and research, speculate beyond what we understand to be currently possible.

Speculative Energy Futures launched at the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Cities & Climate Change Conference and held its first national workshop immediately following the conference from 8-11 March 2018. For more information on Speculative Energy Futures, see the project website: http://speculativeenergyfutures.ca/