I kölvattnet av klimatkrisen har det blivit allt tydligare att det fossilbaserade transportsystemet måste genomgå en global omvandling. Många alternativ för förnyelsebara drivmedel har föreslagits, alla omgivna av föreställningar om hur dessa tekniker kommer att bidra till en bättre framtid. Dessa föreställningar påverkar utvecklingen eftersom implementeringen av varje alternativ teknik kräver uppbyggnad av mångfaldiga socio-tekniska ensembler som stöder dess användning. Som ett resultat av detta är det troligt att processen för att ersätta fossila bränslen med dessa förnybara alternativ kommer bli komplex. Avhandlingen betraktar uppkomsten av två av dessa föreställningar om förnybara bränslen och studerar visioner om biogas och el i ett svenskt sammanhang. Biogas har en lång historia som transportbränsle i Sverige där, även om den utgör en liten andel av den totala bränsleanvändningen, utgör den ändå grunden för många kommunala kollektivtrafiksystem. Elektriska fordon har blivit alltmer attraktiva när fler aktörer anammar en föreställning som ser en framtid där fordon är delade, autonoma och elektriska. Denna interaktion exemplifieras i kollektivtrafik i städer eftersom många kommuner börjar implementera elbussar i ett försök att öka energieffektiviteten och minska föroreningarna. Denna avhandling följer tre fallstudier där föreställningarna om biogas och elfordon samverkar: kollektivtrafik i städerna Linköping respektive Malmö samt en analys av det omfattande nationella policydokumentet Fossilfrihet på väg. Avhandlingen bidrar till en bredare förståelse för hur visioner kan påverka tröghet och förändring av transportalternativ inom den bredare omställningen till en fossilfri framtid. In the wake of the climate crisis, it has become increasingly evident that the fossil fuel-based transport system must undergo a global transformation. Numerous renewable fuel alternatives have been suggested, accompanied by imaginaries of how these technologies will contribute to a better future. These imaginaries have a wide-ranging impact because the implementation of each alternative technology will require the build-up of multifarious socio-technical ensembles that support their use. As a result, replacing fossil fuels with these renewable alternatives is likely to be a complex process. This dissertation considers the emergence of two such visions of renewable fuels studying imaginaries of biogas and electricity in the Swedish context. Biogas has a long history of use as a transport fuel in Sweden, where although it makes up a small percentage of total fuel use it also forms the basis of numerous municipal public transport systems. Meanwhile, electric vehicles have become increasingly attractive as more actors subscribe to an imaginary that sees the future of vehicles as shared, autonomous, and electric. This interaction is exemplified in urban public transportation as many municipalities begin to implement electric buses in an attempt to increase energy efficiency and reduce pollution. This thesis follows three case studies where the imaginaries of biogas and electric vehicles interact: urban public transport in the municipalities of Linköping and Malmö, and analysis of a comprehensive national policy document Fossil fuel freedom on the road. It contributes to a wider understanding of how visions can influence obduracy and change of transport alternatives within the wider transformation to a fossil fuel free future.

The Future of Cities and Energies in Western Europe explores a variety of theoretical and empirical approaches to researching energy issues in Western European cities, as well as urban energy transition. It serves as a collection of materials, instruments, ideas, and theories to embrace this subject. The contributions are interdisciplinary, drawing from areas such as sociology, urbanism, geoecology, architecture, and political science, thus demonstrating that this research topic, which is now gaining full legitimacy in traditional fields, requires open and reflexive dialogues.

This book engages artistic interventions in the aerial elements to investigate the aesthetics and politics of atmosphere. Sensing Art in the Atmosphere: Elemental Lures and Aerosolar Practices traces the potential of artistic, community-driven experiments to amplify our sensing of atmosphere, marrying attentions to atmospheric affect with visceral awareness of the materials, institutions and processes hovering in the air. Drawing on six years of practice-led research with artistic and activist initiatives Museo Aero Solar and Aerocene, initiated by artist Tomás Saraceno, each chapter develops creative relations to atmosphere from the studio to stratospheric currents. Through narrative-led writing, the voices of artists and collaborators are situated and central. In dialogue with these aerographic stories and sites, the book develops a notion of elemental lures: the sensual and imaginative propositions of aerial, atmospheric and meteorological phenomena. The promise of elemental lures, Engelmann suggests, is to reconcile our sensing of atmosphere with the myriad social, cultural and political forces suspended in it. Through tales of floating journeys, shared envelopes of breath and surreal levitations, the book foregrounds the role of art in crafting alternative modes of perceiving, moving and imagining (in) the air. The book ends with a call for elemental experiments in the geohumanities. It makes an important and original contribution to elemental geographies, the geohumanities and interdisciplinary scholarship on air and atmosphere.

Horizons of the Future: Science Fiction, Utopian Imagination, and the Politics of Education examines the relationship between science fiction, education, and social change in the 21st century. Global capitalism is ecologically unsustainable and ethically indefensible; time is running out to alter the course of history if humanity is to have hope of a livable future beyond the next century. However, alternatives are possible, offering much more equality, care, justice, joy, and hope than the established order. Popular culture and schools are key sites of struggles to imagine such alternatives. Drawing on critical theory, cultural studies, and sociology, Slater articulates the promising connection between science fiction and the future of education. He offers cutting-edge engagement with themes, perspectives, and modes of imagination in science fiction that can be mobilized politically and pedagogically to envision and enact critical forms of education that cultivate new utopian ways of relating to self, society, and the future. This thought-provoking book will be of interest to scholars and students in the social sciences and education.

Energy Democracies for Sustainable Futures explores how our dominant carbon and nuclear energy assemblages shape conceptions of participation, risk, and in/securities, and how they might be reengineered to deliver justice and democratic participation in transitioning energy systems. Chapters assess the economies, geographies and politics of current and future energy landscapes, exposing how dominant assemblages (composed of technologies, strategies, knowledge and authorities) change our understanding of security and risk, and how they these shared understandings are often enacted uncritically in policy. Contributors address integral relationships across the production and government of material and human energies and the opportunities for sustainable and democratic governance. In addition, the book explores how interest groups advance idealized energy futures and energy imaginaries. The work delves into the role that states, market organizations and civil society play in envisioned energy change. It assesses how risks and security are formulated in relation to economics, politics, ecology, and human health. It concludes by integrating the relationships between alternative energies and governance strategies, including issues of centralization and decentralization, suggesting approaches to engineer democracy into decision-making about energy assemblages. - Explores descriptive and normative relationships between energy and democracy - Reviews how changing energy demand and governance threaten democracies and democratic institutions - Identifies what participative energy transformations look like when paired with energy security - Reviews what happens to social, economic and political infrastructures in the process of achieving sustainable and democratic transitions

By drawing on a broad range of disciplinary backgrounds, this book illustrates the immense complexities of Svalbard as a place, point of reference, or social concept. It portrays the multiple, situated perspectives that characterize understandings and imaginings of Svalbard, and brings together contributions from academic fields that rarely interact with each other. Svalbard Imaginaries contributes to a number of research contexts, ranging from a broadly conceived, multi-disciplinary field of ‘Arctic Studies’ to more disciplinary specific debates on how places are reworked at the interstices of various global flows and vice versa. It assembles contributions on imaginaries that cover a wide array of issues, including—but not limited to—Svalbard as a geopolitical site, a landscape, an image, a (mining) heritage assemblage, a tourist destination, a wilderness, a built environment, a site of knowledge production, a site of artistic engagement, and projections of the future. It deliberately assembles analyses that refer to a variety of timescales and covers representations of the past, the present, and possible futures of Svalbard.

How can humanities scholars help us respond to growing concerns about climate change and fossil fuels? Energy humanities is a field of scholarship that, like medical and digital humanities before it, aims to overcome traditional boundaries between the disciplines and between academic and applied research. Responding to growing public concern about anthropogenic climate change and the unsustainability of the fuels we use to power our modern society, energy humanists highlight the essential contribution that humanistic insights and methods can make to areas of analysis once thought best left to the natural sciences. In this groundbreaking anthology, Imre Szeman and Dominic Boyer have brought together a carefully curated selection of the best and most influential work in energy humanities. Arguing that today’s energy and environmental dilemmas are fundamentally problems of ethics, habits, imagination, values, institutions, belief, and power—all traditional areas of expertise of the humanities and humanistic social sciences—the essays and other pieces featured here demonstrate the scale and complexity of the issues the world faces. Their authors offer compelling possibilities for finding our way beyond our current energy dependencies toward a sustainable future. Contributors include: Margaret Atwood, Paolo Bacigalupi, Lesley Battler, Ursula Biemann, Dominic Boyer, Italo Calvino, Warren Cariou, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Una Chaudhuri, Claire Colebrook, Stephen Collis, Erik M. Conway, Amy De’Ath, Adam Dickinson, Fritz Ertl, Pope Francis, Amitav Ghosh, Gökçe Günel, Gabrielle Hecht, Cymene Howe, Dale Jamieson, Julia Kasdorf, Oliver Kellhammer, Stephanie LeMenager, Barry Lord, Graeme Macdonald, Joseph Masco, John McGrath, Martin McQuillan, Timothy Mitchell, Timothy Morton, Jean-François Mouhot, Abdul Rahman Munif, Judy Natal, Reza Negarestani, Pablo Neruda, David Nye, Naomi Oreskes, Andrew Pendakis, Karen Pinkus, Ken Saro-Wiwa, Hermann Scheer, Roy Scranton, Allan Stoekl, Imre Szeman, Laura Watts, Michael Watts, Jennifer Wenzel, Sheena Wilson, Patricia Yaeger, and Marina Zurkow

‘Degrowth’, a type of ‘postgrowth’, is becoming a strong political, practical and cultural movement for downscaling and transforming societies beyond capitalist growth and non-capitalist productivism to achieve global sustainability and satisfy everyone’s basic needs. This groundbreaking collection on housing for degrowth addresses key challenges of unaffordable, unsustainable and anti-social housing today, including going beyond struggles for a 'right to the city' to a 'right to metabolism', advocating refurbishment versus demolition, and revealing controversies within the degrowth movement on urbanisation, decentralisation and open localism. International case studies show how housing for degrowth is based on sufficiency and conviviality, living a ‘one planet lifestyle’ with a common ecological footprint. This book explores environmental, cultural and economic housing and planning issues from interdisciplinary perspectives such as urbanism, ecological economics, environmental justice, housing studies and policy, planning studies and policy, sustainability studies, political ecology, social change and degrowth. It will appeal to students and scholars across a wide range of disciplines.

Climate Crisis, Energy Violence: Mapping Fossil Energy's Enduring Grasp on Our Precarious Future communicates the breadth and scope of fossil fuel infrastructure and its global impact. Comparative research coupled with data and maps accentuates the spatial, temporal, and physical forms of energy violence. Over 25 international case studies track the world's three primary fossil fuels—first coal, followed by oil, then gas—revealing patterns of loss and damage, as well as industrial tactics of climate delay and deception used to prolong fossil fuel harms. Through analyses of hotspots, sacrifice zones, fast vs slow violence, death prints and fuel life cycles, immediate ecological damage as well as long-term climate impacts are revealed, tied directly to fossil fuel interests. In detailing the broad scope of damage from energy extraction systems, this book provides a compelling argument to move past fossil fuels, directly confronting the climate crisis through energy justice alliances. - Examines fossil fuel infrastructure across more than 25 unique global research sites - Analyzes energy violence in a theoretical yet accessible framework grounded in ecology, ethics, and human rights - Explores collective action and energy justice alliances to move past the destructive pattern of fossil fuels

Explores fracking’s dual impact on settler colonial culture and sustainability Through meticulous research and poignant storytelling, Land of Extraction unravels the complex web of relationships between humans, places, and the environment, all bound by the concept of private property. It presents a thought-provoking analysis of how settler colonial culture imposes limits on environmental politics. Drawing on real-life events, fictional portrayals of fossil-fuel driven apocalypses, and firsthand ethnographic accounts of the fracking and pipeline boom in West Virginia, Rebecca R. Scott argues that the American dream’s promise of empowerment through property ownership actually restricts action against extractive industries and hampers the progress of environmental justice coalitions. As the ever-expanding reach of natural gas and pipeline industries takes its toll on communities, the book reveals the fractures in landowners’ reliance on private property, opening the door to more sustainable futures. A powerful call to reevaluate our perspectives and challenge the status quo, this book will leave readers questioning the foundations of our society and the possibilities that lie ahead.