How we experience and imagine fossil fuels and their infrastructures plays a significant role in influencing our relationship to them and, in turn, shapes the prospects for transition so necessary for cooling the rapidly warming planet. In this seminar, part of Toolkit for Today: Carbon Present, Jordan B. Kinder explores how the costs and benefits of fossil fuels and their infrastructures are unevenly experienced and imagined in relation to two natural gas pipeline projects: the failed Mackenzie Valley Pipeline and the in-construction Coastal GasLink Pipeline. Contestation over these settler colonial infrastructures has been staged not only over the usual suspects of land, territory, and jurisdiction, but also in terms of conflicting ways of experiencing and imagining energy and infrastructure. Developing the concepts of energy consciousness and energy imaginaries to address these conflicts centred on energy futures materialized through the built environment, this seminar offers a critical vocabulary for confronting the uneven dimensions of our carbon present while accounting for strategies of resistance that offer ways out of this present; a present defined by carbon lock-in and path dependency.

Jordan B. Kinder is a settler-British and Metis scholar of media and the environmental humanities. An incoming postdoctoral fellow with the Mahindra Humanities Center at Harvard University (2022-23) and future assistant professor in the Department of Communication Studies at Wilfrid Laurier University, he has published on the cultural politics of energy, media, infrastructure, and environment in journals including the Canadian Journal of Communication, Mediations, and South Atlantic Quarterly.

This event is free and open to the public. To register, click here.

Readings

Ted Jackson, “Resisting Pipeline Imperialism: The Struggle for Self-Determination in the Canadian North,” Alternatives 7, no. 4 (1978): 40–51.

Jordan B. Kinder, “Mystifying Oil Today,” Heliotrope (November 2020).

Zoe Tood, “Fish, Kin and Hope: Tending to Water Violations in Amiskwaciwâskahikan and Treaty Six Territory,” Afterall: A Journal of Art, Context and Enquiry 43 (2017): 102–7.