SHEENA WILSON

Dr. Sheena Wilson is Associate Professor at the University of Alberta, co-director of the international Petrocultures Research Group (petrocultures.com), and research-lead on Just Powers (justpowers.ca), an interdisciplinary and community-engaged initiative focused on climate justice organized around socially just—feminist and decolonial—energy transition for all. Funded by the Future Energy Systems’ Canada First Research Excellence Fund (CFREF), a Canada Tri-Council SSHRC Insight grant, the Francophone Secretariat of Alberta and the Kule Institute for Advanced Study (KIAS), research projects ongoing under Just Powers include, amongst others, Feminist Energy Futures: Power Shift and Environmental Social Justice; 2) Speculative Energy Futures 3) iDoc and 4) Bigstone Cree: A Vision for the Future. Publication highlights include Petrocultures: Oil, Politics, Cultures w/ Adam Carlson and Imre Szeman (MQUP, 2017); Gendering Oil: Tracing Western Petrosexual Relations” (2014); and Sighting Oil w/Andrew Pendakis (2012). Dr. Wilson’s monograph in process is titled Deep Energy Literacy: Toward Just Futures.

Sustainability: Deep Energy Literacy
New energy sources will create new material conditions for the forms and habits of social life out of which new politics, new economies, and new ways of being and doing will arise. This paper will argue for feminist energy transition, with its political potential to resist and redress the ongoing inequities of the age of oil and fossil-fuelled power. Deep energy literacy demands meaningful reflection on how energy sources and systems are not only technological and infrastructural but also social; it requires an accounting of how oil-powered patriarchal colonial capitalism and the climate change that it has triggered have produced and continue to enforce extreme inequities built on histories of systemic violence that disadvantage the majority of the global population—especially girls and women—living on the margins of modern life, not to mention a whole host of species endangered on a warming and increasingly toxic planet.