Energy, Extraction, and Religion Seminar
In the fourth of our five year EER Seminar, we invite proposals about the fusion of religiously emboldened political power, energy infrastructures, and extractive economies.
One session will be an author-meets-critics forum featuring Mohamed Amer Meziane’s States of the Earth: An Ecological and Racial History of Secularization (Verso 2024). Engaging current debates in secular studies and political theology, Meziane theorizes secularism neither as de-Christianization nor the continuation of Christianity. In the face of failed mass conversion of colonial subjects, Meziane demonstrates that imperial powers turned efforts toward secular civilizing missions, pursuing eschatological perfection on Earth through industrialization and fossil fuel extraction. Meziane therefore offers an alternative to the fossil capital narrative of climate emergency, demonstrating fossil capitalism, colonialism, and the violence of the modern state as rooted in “imperiality,” or the ongoing afterlives of imperialism. We invite proposals for responses to Meziane’s text as well as proposals that speak to the text’s broader themes.
For our second session, we invite reflections about the ways “extraction” and “extractivism” show up in the study of religion. There are at least three dimensions to this, and we encourage interested paper proposals to consider how to incorporate one of these dimensions.
(1) As we meet in Boston in 2025, with its long history of colonialism and nationalism, and in light of current shifts in US and global geopolitics, we welcome papers about those realities pertaining to energy, extraction, and religion.
(2) In this vein, what does Dominic Boyer’s lens of energopower, or the “codependence between our contemporary infrastructures of political power and our infrastructures of energy”—a fusion of a “particular organization of fuel” and the “particular organization of state-based political power” (Boyer 2019, 16)--illuminate in the current moment? Furthermore, what might this lens facilitate in the study of religion, and how can the study of religion further shape it?
(3) We also invite paper proposals that delve into topics that have surfaced as crucial to engage over our three prior years of meetings. These areas of possible examination include but are not limited to:
- Where are extraction/extractivism being invoked? In what ways and to what ends? What theorists help to clarify the dynamics involved?
- Who is doing the work of bringing extractivism into religious or theological discourses?
- How is “extraction” (and related concepts) defined, theorized or undertheorized in ways salient to the study of religion and the environmental humanities?
- How are human aspirations for energy and extraction facilitated/resisted/interrupted by nonhuman and more than human forces and entities? What frameworks and analytics, including those from the study of religion, can enable us to better capture these dynamics?
- Where do dynamics of extraction go unrecognized or under-theorized? What difference does/would/could it make to bring a critical apparatus regarding extraction into these contexts and discourses? Where is more critical examination and scholarly specificity needed?
- What is the relationship of extraction to other critical phenomena and concepts, such as (but not limited to): exploitation; racial capitalism; colonialism and coloniality?
- How is energy and extraction taught? How do you teach it? How should it be taught within religious and theological studies?
- What are some key voices or texts on energy/extractivism that religion scholars should be more aware of, for research or for teaching or both?
- What is the relationship between epistemological or conceptual extractivism and material extraction? How do these dynamics appear in the academy and/or production of research? What are constructive ways to engage and ameliorate such dynamics? In this sense, we invite presentations that build on the 2022 EER session on methodological extractivism in the study of religion (which included presentations on “prospecting” dynamics in environmental humanities, extractive scholarly methods, and anti-extractive and reparative scholarship).
- How are religious traditions “mined” for solutions to contemporary problems in popular culture, in scholarship, or in environmental humanities?
This seminar provides an intellectual space to foreground relations, dynamics, and critiques among religion, energy, and extraction. For scholars in a variety of humanistic and social scientific disciplines, extractivism provides a conceptual rubric through which to re-conjoin analyses of racialization and exploitation with concerns about ecology and sustainability. This is particularly the case in the environmental and energy humanities. In light of multidisciplinary scholarly discourses on extractivism, this seminar aims to conscientiously link social and ecological justice questions as a matter of theoretical and methodological rigor; to explicitly and directly attend to racial capitalism and coloniality as constitutive of environmental crises; to facilitate and improve dialogue between religion scholars and the environmental humanities, focusing attention on the religious dimensions of energy intensive and extractive cultures; and engage in reflexive analyses of the study and constructions of religion in, with, and through cultures of energy and extractivism.
| Chair | Dates | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| Evan Berry, Arizona State University | evan.berry@asu.edu | - | View |
| Terra Schwerin Rowe | terra.rowe@unt.edu | - | View |