A Cosmopolitics of Energy: Diverging Materialities and Hesitating Practices

Abstract

Numerous proposals, analyses, and strategies now exist for materializing energy in order to influence environmental participation and reduce energy use. This paper asks how specific materialities of energy are articulated across social science and creative practice projects, and how these distinct renderings of materiality perform environmental change. Drawing on work by Stengers, the paper moves to consider the diverging materialities and speculative practices that might emerge through more cosmopolitical approaches to energy. A range of creative practice projects that materialize energy and perform environmental change in different registers is discussed, with attention given to considering how what counts as materiality, participation, and environmental matters of concern shifts within these differently configured engagements. The paper asks how alternative materialities of energy might be articulated that work through experimental registers of environmental practice, and that may not always be clearly directed toward instrumental ends. How might environmental practices attend to the speculative qualities of performativity, which engage not just with energy as actuality but also with energy as potentiality?

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