Speculative Energy Futures

Project description

Oil is more than an industry in Alberta. It is embedded in the cultural imagination. The capital city of Edmonton has given its hockey team the moniker, ‘the Oilers’; at a local McDonald’s there is a colourful pumpjack standing sentinel outside the play area; and on the way to her office, Professor Sheena Wilson can glimpse oil refineries. Everyone is embedded somehow, even the University she works at. However, the discourses of power around oil and the energy transition are largely technologically driven and informed by male-dominated disciplines and industries. That’s why Sheena Wilson started Speculative Energy Futures and the larger Just Powers umbrella project, focused on feminist and decolonial approaches to climate and energy justice.

Just Powers and Speculative Energy Futures invite us to imagine alternative futures beyond what we as a society currently understand to be possible, and to think about the energy transition as not simply a technological issue, but one that demands social and cultural shifts as well.

‘We have enough tech to already be doing so much more to meet our climate targets if only the culture shifts were in place. And at the end of the day, what is needed is to change our ways of doing business-as-usual, and that will include changes to the way we structure our daily lived realities.’
Sheena Wilson, Professor of Media and Cultural Studies

Speculative Energy Futures was started in 2017 by Sheena Wilson, Professor of Media, Communications and Energy Humanities at the University of Alberta and co-founder and co-director of the international Petrocultures Research Group, and Natalie Loveless, Professor of History of Art, Design and Visual Culture, University of Alberta. It is a long-term project that brings together artists, activists, scientists, engineers, policymakers, social science and energy humanities researchers, and Indigenous legal experts and Knowledge Keepers, to explore possible energy futures through research-creation methodologies and practice-led research.

Focused on ecological, climate and energy justice, Speculative Energy Futures recognises that there exists no social or ecological justice without decolonisation and Indigenisation, the process of recognising Indigenous knowledge, practices and perspectives. This means we must overcome the current extractivist worldviews that dominate and have contributed to climate change by exploiting land, resources and people. Therefore, Speculative Energy Futures aims to explore possible pathways to an energy transition based on feminist and decolonial approaches. The team behind it currently consists of about 21 interdisciplinary participants who work together to develop arts-based outputs, research and high-profile exhibitions informed by science, Indigenous knowledge and energy humanities theory.

Collaborative leadership

Over the years, people in the project have come and gone, which is a part of their approach to making long-term collaboration work. People can take part in the project with the resources they have. From the beginning, people were free to choose who they wanted to work with and which topics related to energy transition they wanted to work on. Natalie Loveless and Sheena Wilson simply trust that everybody gives as much as they can when they can.

For Sheena Wilson, the key to a good collaboration process is building strong relationships by giving people space to share ideas and meet in informal spaces; this is where ideas grow, and people meet and figure out how and if they can work together. Another important aspect is to organise the project in a non-hierarchical way with shared ownership, which means that they, as principal investigators, did not set a fixed goal and handed out tasks, but instead created a space for people to collaborate equally:

‘We’re looking for synergies. We bring people together and if synergies happen it is great. If we are advocating for anti-extractive practices in the world, then we also need to be doing our organising and our relationship building with each other in a non-extractive way.’
Natalie Loveless, Professor of History of Art, Design and Visual Culture

Criteria of generosity

Sheena Wilson and Natalie Loveless had one core criterion for the participants in the project: generosity. For them, any successful interdisciplinary collaboration requires a spirit of generosity, meaning the willingness to share, to be vulnerable, humble and to be the one who does not know. The criterion of generosity also means that there is room for different perspectives and that everyone has agreed to that. It is a feminist and decolonial organising principle that invites everyone in. It deviates from a patriarchal leadership model by not having a strictly hierarchical command structure, which for them is important for achieving climate justice.

To allow such generous synergies to arise, Sheena Wilson and Natalie Loveless created a series of workshops for the project that allowed people to come together and figure out what they wanted to do. The workshops started in 2018 and will run through to 2025. The point of workshopping is for everyone to get to know each other and learn about each other’s skills. Through these, they learned about the energy transition and climate justice, and they shared their skills with each other. Printmakers took people to their studio, a writer started a collaborative newspaper, one had experience with games, and so things grew organically. Because the project overlapped with the COVID-19 pandemic, some workshops were held online. Outcomes were generated organically and the result is a large body of responsive research, exhibitions and the Fluxkit for Energy Transition.

Prototypes for Possible Worlds

The early outputs were showcased in December 2019 at an exhibition called Prototypes for Possible Worlds in the Fine Arts Building (FAB) Gallery, University of Alberta, which laid the groundwork for the Speculative Energy Futures FluxKit for Energy Transition. The exhibition showcased early research and research-creation and engaged the university community as well as the broader community in discussions about the climate emergency. It also showcased the interdisciplinary collaborative work produced by the participants and stated the importance of speculation as a means and method of thinking about the future.

‘How can we speculate about other ways of living that would then result in different energy logics and energy systems; aspects that include the social side of life, and not just the technological aspects?’
Sheena Wilson, Professor of Media and Cultural Studies

Three years later the prototypes had been refined, and the Speculative Energy Futures team was invited by members of the University of St. Gallen’s Contextual Studies department to conduct an intensive course on energy transition and energy justice in St. Gallen, Switzerland. While there, the team collaborated across departments, setting up an interactive, pop-up exhibition Unpacking Energy Transition (FluxKit Beta Tests) at the University’s new building SQUARE – an interdisciplinary space dedicated to fostering dialogue between science, society, business, politics and culture.

15 members of the team were designated SQUARE’s inaugural artists-in-residence, and in addition to the course they engaged community members, students and scholars in dialogue with the artistic elements of the FluxKit through the pop-up exhibition, exploring what synergies and solidarities they share with the Swiss community. They also held workshops to highlight the importance of art in our conversations around energy transition. Working with students and scholars and being in dialogue in the classroom and with the community while in St. Gallen helped refine the FluxKit further.

Fluxkit for Energy Transition

A FluxKit is defined as a collection of multiple objects, forms and artworks that are meant to be used by people. In this case, it consists of both physical and digital parts. It is the outcome of an experimental collaboration: discussions about energy with interventions from people within the arts. The Speculative Energy Futures FluxKit is essentially a toolkit to help us think about the energy transition as a social and cultural shift and not simply as a technical one.

Natalie Loveless and Sheena Wilson never started out by saying that they wanted people to make projects for a FluxKit, they just said – we are working with the energy transition and climate justice through interdisciplinary engagement. Over the years people produced different tools that all went into the FluxKit.

One example of this is the game Scores for Energy Transition made by Natalie Loveless and Scott Smallwood. It’s meant to be used at the pub, at a dinner table or in a classroom to facilitate social shifts among us and encourage material action. It comes in a box with two dice that have different energy source icons on the sides and a series of cards. Some cards are about speculation, some foster dialogue, some are research cards and some are collaboration cards.

The game starts by rolling the dice and choosing a card. By following the instructions, people will have conversations around energy – some of which are playful and some of which are serious, asking them to consider all kinds of energy sources required for them to be where they are in that given moment, making the sources visible to them. The questions are imaginative, funny and serious at the same time. One asks people to identify which energy source is better for their location. Among the possible energy sources are nuclear and solar but also psychic energy to help participants speculate, laugh and elevate conversations in a playful way.

Audience

The toolkit is targeted to help students, community and community organisers, policymakers, scholars across various disciplines and technical energy experts create dialogue and take action on the social and cultural shifts demanded by an energy transition. It is meant to circulate and educate.

It is an educational tool meant for classrooms in universities and high schools. It is interdisciplinary and can be used in economics, health sciences, engineering and in creative spaces as a conversation starter, as a way to explore the role of art in energy transition and to engage and motivate young people to speculate about our energy future. The kit itself can be stored in libraries, museums, education sites and community spaces and can be used to influence policymakers as well. The project will finish in 2025, but by then the kit will have its own life.

‘The FluxKit is a pedagogical tool to be activated in different local sites. And the main argument is that energy transition is not only technological, but both social and locally situated and responsive. Therefore, the toolkit is meant to be activated in various places by communities.’
Natalie Loveless, Professor of History of Art, Design and Visual Culture

Several of the elements in the kit have game elements and require people to be open and use their imagination. For Natalie Loveless, the key aspect of play is that it requires generosity – willingness and capacity to engage. Often games are seen as frivolous, but play is a serious social activity. It is vital to open up spaces and new ideas, and when it comes to the climate crisis, it can help us re-engage post-eco anxiety by bringing humour and play into the discussion.

The FluxKit is designed mainly to be a physical object, relatively lightweight and easy to transport. All elements are physical and hopefully, most will be available online for download so that they can circulate. Here are some of the tools in the kit:

Bundle
By Janice Makokis, Kurtis McAdam, Patrick Mahon, Ruth Beer, and Sheena Wilson, with support from Barbara Mahon, Sharmistha Kar, and Pat Makokis.

Bundle incorporates several different components folded into a literal ‘bundle’ of knowledge: Indigenous oral storytelling teachings; a poetic zine that combines intersectional feminist and Indigenous ways of knowing and worldviews, alongside Indigenous prophecies; cedar and tobacco, medicines used in Indigenous teaching and ceremony; a birch-bark print and other visually impactful images accompanied by a series of audio-recorded Indigenous prophecies shared by various knowledge keepers. At the SQUARE exhibition, Bundle appeared as both a portable folded canvas parcel, as it will circulate in the final FluxKit, and as a large hanging canvas interactive banner with pockets that contained the above-mentioned components.

Planet for Sale
By Sean Caulfield, Steven Hoffman, Caitlin Fisher with design by Sue Colberg.

Planet for Sale is a speculative book featuring lino and woodblock prints alongside poems and text drawing inspiration from Elinor Ostrom’s response to ‘the tragedy of the commons’. The woodblock-print book imagines a literal planet for sale, in which our shared, or ‘common’, resources are depleted and destroyed by people acting in their own self-interest. The book’s narrator specifically points to a choice that was given to and made by people living at a certain time, whose actions and inactions created monstrous outgrowths and scenes of environmental destruction that, while fictional, are perhaps not dissimilar to what many people are experiencing today as the climate crisis worsens.

Scores for Energy Transition
By Natalie Loveless and Scott Smallwood, with design by Sergio Serrano.

Scores for Energy Transition is a dice-and-card-based dialogic game that invites players to consider the kinds of energy we rely on every day, and how we might rethink the relationships between energy and our basic needs. Inspired in part by the event scores of Fluxus artists Yoko Ono and George Brecht, Scores for Energy Transition can be played as a turn-based game, encouraging activities including personal research, artistic expression, debates, and conversation; or they can function as prompts for solo contemplation.

Full list of FluxKit projects.

Sustainability issues

Moving society away from techno-centrism: Speculative Energy Futures helps us think of energy as social as well as technical. Instead of adapting our social behaviour to technological reality, Speculative Energy Futures wants us to centre the social solutions to energy transition. Otherwise, we will continue the extractive approach that led us here. To ensure we include these aspects, social scientists, artists and activists, among others, need to be involved in the energy transition. The project organisers felt that for too long the approach has been focused almost exclusively on tech: better batteries, more solar, more wind and now increasingly hydrogen and nuclear solutions. Sheena Wilson points out that electrifying our cars doesn’t eliminate the need for roads, and roads colonise space and create urban sprawl; so while electrification might solve one small aspect of a much more complex problem, it hardly tackles the root causes that have landed us in this crisis. Complex problems require complex solutions, and electrifying our automobility is one version of a high-tech quick fix that doesn’t demand that we actually change the way we live or relate to the environment or each other. What we need instead are meaningful shifts in how we live, work, play and be in the world. She says:

‘I don’t want Elon Musk solving my problems because I don’t think Elon Musk has a very feminist and anti-colonial way of approaching the world.’
Sheena Wilson, Professor of Media and Cultural Studies

Environmental education and active participation with our energy futures: Research shows that we don’t need more information about climate change to increase engagement with climate. What we need is a shift in practice and opportunities to involve a wider part of the population. Therefore, the team behind Speculative Energy Futures wanted pedagogical, creative and fun ways to deal with the changes.

Through artistic practice and eventually the FluxKit, they invite people into an experimental and participatory experience and an ongoing set of conversations. The toolkit is meant to circulate and educate in classrooms and communities as a way to engage and motivate young people to speculate about their energy future. Outputs that engage in different ways help people involved to think of energy as a social and cultural as well as technical issue. Outputs from this project that support active participation with our energy futures include:

• Prototypes for Possible Worlds: An exhibition that showcased the interdisciplinary collaborative work produced by the participants stated the importance of speculation as a means and method of thinking about the future (2019). Five hundred people attended the exhibition.
• The FluxKit (animated version): Speculative Energy Futures team showcased and animated the FluxKit for Energy Transition as a pop-up exhibition called Unpacking Energy Transition (FluxKit Beta Tests), at the University of St. Gallen, Switzerland (2022). Two thousand people interacted with the exhibition.
• Two-week intensive course: Energy Transition: Pathways to Climate Justice, University of St. Gallen, Switzerland (2022).

Lessons, tips and advice

• Take your time: Collaborations with a wide range of backgrounds take time to foster results that exceed the sum of the individuals involved.
• Include multiple backgrounds: Including a wide range of backgrounds, whether from different disciplines, cultures or communities of practice increases the complexity. This requires taking the care and time to develop a common shared language. However, including many disciplines provides access to multiple vocabularies and can reach different audiences and sectors, because they have had people who speak the language of various disciples and communities.
• Know your audience and engage in different ways: To engage politicians and academics requires different strategies – having team members with different backgrounds can help reach these.
• Establish a shared language: Within the project it has been important for team members to make time to understand each other’s different discipline-specific vocabularies. Natalie Loveless describes that sometimes a single word means something very different in different disciplines and therefore it is crucial to take the time to learn each other’s languages to create a synergistic collaboration.
• Engage people through games: Games can be vital to opening up spaces and new ideas, and when it comes to the climate crisis, they can help us re-engage post-eco anxiety by bringing humour and play into the discussion.
• The importance of speculation: Speculation can help us have difficult conversations, to imagine alternative futures beyond what we as society currently understand to be possible and to think about the energy transition as not simply a technological issue, but one that demands social and cultural shifts as well.
• Build trust: Trust is vital for long-term collaborations. In this project, it was shown by allowing everybody to give as much as they can when they can.
• Encourage generosity: Making sure that all participants shared the key value of generosity was key. Staying open and curious and having the willingness to share and make mistakes was crucial for every part of the project.

Partners and stakeholders

• Future Energy Systems (FES): Speculative Energy Futures has strong ties to FES, with a focus on multidisciplinary research that develops the energy technologies, integrates them into today’s infrastructure and examines possible consequences for our society, economy and environment. FES is a large network of research projects run out of the University of Alberta; it was initially funded with a $75 million grant from the Canadian federal government’s Canada First Research Excellence Fund, which has since grown much larger. Several members of the Speculative Energy Futures team are also members of other FES research teams, working on specific energy transition questions and technologies.
• University of St. Gallen: The University of St. Gallen is located in St. Gallen, Switzerland. In November 2022, Sheena Wilson, Natalie Loveless and the Speculative Energy Futures team were invited to teach an intensive course on climate transition and energy justice by the Contextual Studies department. This evolved into a collaboration with the University’s new SQUARE, an interdisciplinary space dedicated to fostering dialogue between science, society, business, politics and culture. The 15 team members were the inaugural artists-in-residence. In addition to the course, titled Energy Transition: Pathways to Climate Justice, Speculative Energy Futures artists and scholars animated a series of installations as part of the pop-up exhibition Unpacking Energy Transition (FluxKit Beta Tests).
• The Fine Arts Building (FAB): The FAB Gallery is a part of the University of Alberta, Edmonton. In December 2019, the Speculative Energy Futures team presented early research findings in the form of an interactive art exhibition titled Prototypes for Possible Worlds. This early research output addressed not only the typical FAB Gallery audiences – which includes students at the undergraduate and graduate levels, faculty and staff, and national and international audiences – but also invited policymakers from various levels of government, upper academic administration and a range of interdisciplinary research, especially those working on energy transition, including FES scientists and engineers. FAB Gallery exhibitions – featuring both in-house curated exhibitions as well as travelling exhibitions organised by other galleries and academic centres – attract approximately 13,000 guests a year to the Department of Art & Design. Read more about the gallery here.
• Onion Lake Cree Nation: The Onion Lake Cree Nation is located in the Province of Saskatchewan, 50km north of Lloydminster. Researchers on Speculative Energy Futures collaborated with the Nation’s education department to host a two day workshop for Onion Lake youths and Elders/Knowledge Keepers interested in sharing and exploring their roles and responsibilities to the land and environment in a changing climate through artistic practice. Activities included teaching the youth to use audio equipment to capture conversations with Elders, using audio-visual equipment to explore relationships to place and environment and expressing themselves through print and found artwork.
• Saddle Lake Cree Nation and Big River First Nation (Treaty 6): Speculative Energy Futures includes researchers and affiliate partners from Saddle Lake Cree Nation and Big River Cree Nation. These researchers provide ongoing contributions to the thinking on Speculative Energy Futures, as well as leadership on working in a just way, which includes decolonising our thinking, making and being practices.

Funding

• Speculative Energy Futures is part of a large iterative interdisciplinary project called Just Powers, which was funded in late 2017.
• Funding sources: Canada First Research Excellence Fund, Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, Kule Institute for Advanced Study; Young Canada Works; community matching funds. For a full list of funders please visit the Just Powers website.
• The total amount of funding for Just Powers was approximately $3.5 million coming from multiple sources. The funding process was iterative, responsive and emergent. This type of multi-modal approach to funding enabled the Project Lead and Co-Lead to be responsive to the different needs of the SEF project, as many funding sources have specific parameters that include barriers that impact both decolonial and artistic research requirements, including particularly onerous processes of justification.

‘When funders give millions to energy tech and innovation, matching funds need to be provided for researchers working to move the dial on climate culture shifts. Tech alone won’t create the changes we need.’
Sheena Wilson, Professor of Media and Cultural Studies

Relevant links

• Just Powers
• Speculative Energy Futures
• The FluxKit
• Prototypes for Possible Worlds

All images provided courtesy of Just Powers and The University of Alberta.