coe189_wilson.mp3

Speaker1: [00:00:23] Oh, hello, cultures of energetic people. We are glad to have you with us, as always, I'm trying out my mellifluous radio voice, which is made better by the fact that I've been inhaling dust particles for the better part of a week.

Speaker2: [00:00:39] As I say, our studio is actually at the least dusty as has ever been after a massive cleanup here.

Speaker1: [00:00:45] Right? But that's because we've eaten half the dirt.

Speaker2: [00:00:48] All the dust is in my lungs and

Speaker1: [00:00:50] Your lungs right now and throat. But that's OK. It's good. I mean, it's extra fiber, probably.

Speaker2: [00:00:55] Sure, it's like one of those internal cleanses, except through your lungs, and it's just by inhaling a lot of cotton particles. I've seen the dog like walking around so many times those few days, just like a like a dust bunny hanging off the side

Speaker1: [00:01:08] Of her mouth. It's sad because she's I think she thinks it's like a little animal or a toy or something like she finds some grubby dust bunny

Speaker2: [00:01:16] Hairball and sticks to the side of her face and she's sitting there

Speaker1: [00:01:19] Conflagration. And yeah, sometimes it sticks to her little wet nose. It's kind of cute, but she just didn't seem to mind. It's rather embarrassing.

Speaker2: [00:01:28] Speaking of multi-species encounters, as we were getting through a complicated, occasionally trying week of cleaning our house out, getting ready to to leave town. One of the ways we kept ourselves sane in our evening ramblings and ruminations was imagining what it would be like if Rice were to become, and, you know, fill in your own university there if you're feeling it doesn't need to be right. Jessie Rice is just what we were talking about.

Speaker1: [00:01:53] I think it should be hard for it actually to really set to really set the tone.

Speaker2: [00:01:57] Just imagine that your academic institution, your PhD program, decided that the way it was going to make itself distinctive and cutting edge would be to be the first PhD program to admit multi species students right? Nonhuman. So a multi species PhD program? Yeah. And that led to some mirth and some serious serious issues arose logistically and ethically around training, animals and anthropology. And I think

Speaker1: [00:02:26] I think I seriously think it should be a political science program. I don't think anthropology can afford to take such risks.

Speaker2: [00:02:33] But you know, I'm figuring in most of these animals are already anthropologists and that they have some ideas about the human right and they probably have very different ideas about the human than we do.

Speaker1: [00:02:41] Well, there are some cool ideas about what was the one that I was. Was it the bats or was it? I think it was the reptiles. They could do like this thermal thermal because they would use their corpus, their, you know, their ability to sense the subtleties of a heat in ways that could be really interesting and productive. And then we had, oh yes, the bat, the echolocate live. Yeah, ethnography where they use their, particularly because that's what I'm saying is that we had to focus on the capacities of each the distinct capacities that these creatures have capacities, right? Here's my favorite because you were talking about like you were given a lecture, right? Like we were just imagining like you're teaching the sort of upper division theory class in anthropology.

Speaker2: [00:03:25] You walk into the pro seminar theory class and you're facing an alligator to mosquitoes, a dog and a cat.

Speaker1: [00:03:34] Well, yeah. The funny thing was, is that we kind of began with the mammals, but then that felt really species is like, you can. You can kind of one can almost imagine like a chimpanzee or some of the higher primates. We kind of did a polar bear. I think we started with the polar bear slapping his paw down on the table like we started with the mammals. But then it became clear that we needed to also account for.

Speaker2: [00:03:57] We didn't start with polar bears because I think I think we imagine that if you were going to make this pitch to like your dean of graduate studies, you'd have to start with the animals that have proved that they can learn things from humans in the past, right? Because you're not going to because I mean, that's an even more radical suggestion would be like having like cats, teaching dogs and having, you know. Well, yeah, was teaching pelicans. But but I think we figured we'd probably have to start with cats and dogs. Well, there's an argument about cats. Do cats ever learn anything from humans, people or the jury's out on that, but dogs anyway?

Speaker1: [00:04:27] I think the dogs are dogs are obvious. And dogs have an important companion species and have been important theoretically to right, especially to people like dona€t. So obviously, dogs, probably dogs are the first, but I think the primates are definitely need to be in there too, as do dolphins. But so then we get into the accommodations, right? Like we we need to accommodate learning and seating and mobility for our human students and colleagues and our non-human students. So if you have a dolphin in your class, you would need to have a proper tank. Yeah.

Speaker2: [00:05:02] Oh, you know, so

Speaker1: [00:05:02] That they can do their learning. You're going to have to

Speaker2: [00:05:04] Cover up their game massively in terms of accommodating,

Speaker1: [00:05:08] I'm not even getting into the whales, which is another another creature that we know can learn has learned to take instruction via very highly intelligent. So I mean by that right, they should be in there. But then we had this. We kind of also. I had some

Speaker2: [00:05:22] Real wondering ageism would be a problem, too, because we're talking about mosquitoes and like male mosquitoes, only live ten days and female mosquitoes live like two months. So wouldn't there be a natural preference if you were doing a PhD program to teach only female mosquitoes because the men are going to be dead in a couple of days anyway? I mean, would they even have time to do fieldwork

Speaker1: [00:05:41] When really reduce the amount, like even with the female mosquitoes of two weeks, we would really reduce the required field work duration like given their lifespan. I mean, their fieldwork would have to last about 30 seconds or something, right?

Speaker2: [00:05:55] And you'd have to you'd have to really have these like compressed coursework to I mean, you couldn't really give them, you know, a semester's worth of material that's a lifetime.

Speaker1: [00:06:04] You were also concerned with the mosquitoes that it would be hard to tell whether they were in the classroom.

Speaker2: [00:06:10] Yeah, you could walk in somebody you walk in and they'd be quiet down everyone. Quiet down, quiet time, quiet down until you heard that telltale buzz. Oh great. Ok, OK, our mosquitoes are here.

Speaker1: [00:06:21] I mean, I think like in the way I imagined it, and this is how we got to the almost Gary Larson cartoon level. There are some Gary Larson. I kind of imagine the mosquito like sit in in our in our seminar room where we teach a lot of the classes just sitting on the back of the chair, like just perched right there on the back of the chair. And then you could see it pretty clearly if they sat right in the middle. But the other the the larger question about kind of pedagogical violence and the potential for it is that if that female mosquito, we're going to admit instead of the male because she's actually going to complete the degree right? You know, she needs to collect blood for her babies. That's right. Right, and it's her instinct, and she needs to do it. So like if you were lecturing,

Speaker2: [00:07:05] You should no more have to put off reproduction for an academic career than any other species

Speaker1: [00:07:09] Than any other human. That's right. And so what if she were to like, say, you know, you were teaching or I were teaching? And she came over and landed and, you know, just took a drink like, what if you just instinctively, you know, swatted the skitter like it could? I mean, it wouldn't be intentional. Like, you're not trying to murder your student, right? But it could easily happen. Then there's also the problem of, you know, the companion, the command companion species in the classroom, too. So because like, I wanted to have a bat for sure, but I don't think I think it would be wrong to have a bat and a mosquito in the same space.

Speaker2: [00:07:47] Well, yeah.

Speaker1: [00:07:47] Well, because one would be terrified, rightly so. And the other would be frustrated and sort of frothing at the mouth.

Speaker2: [00:07:54] Right. And you also have to think about when animals are at their peak learning capacity, like what's the right like? They say teenagers really should be allowed to sleep in. You shouldn't have Adam classes for teenagers, teenage humans, that is, they are going to do their best learning in the afternoon. Well, what about a bat? Like, you can't wake a bat up at eight a.m. and expect you're going to get peak mammalian brain performance from that bat that bats are going to want to be asleep then? And so but then at night, you know, you're having trouble with the humans. And I think the whole thing boils down to me in the end to some more profound ethical questions, which is like if humans decide they're going to form a multi species PhD program, on what basis do you get consent from these other species that they want to be involved with learning anthropology? They might be. You're right, the whole thing could be seen as a great prison camp or some kind of weird experiment the humans are doing. Like how would you communicate to them the value of anthropology in a multi species way that would encourage them to want to do the coursework and the field? You know, and then the other thing was, of course, research products, as they call them these days, like what kind of publications are you going to get and how are we going to figure out how best to evaluate those? I'm just I'm just raising some questions, people. We all know this is a solid idea. We all know this should happen somewhere. We all know what's going to happen somewhere. I'm just raising some practical questions and some some ethical questions.

Speaker1: [00:09:12] I kind of likes the idea of the the chameleon who changes colors, according to the theoretical topic of the day. Sure, they would like. Ok, so you're doing your marks lecture that they would read. And then I come in, I throw down some fuko purple, right? Lavender, maybe? What would you say?

Speaker2: [00:09:32] Lavender? Yeah, I'd say lavender.

Speaker1: [00:09:34] Lavender. Can I even turn lavender? I don't know. But hopefully, anyway, we were going. That was like the deep end over there.

Speaker2: [00:09:41] So this is what happens when you combine a lot of stress together with basically having half your lungs filled with with dust bunnies and dirt clouds. And so. So oh my god, you had oxygen. And yeah, what?

Speaker1: [00:09:56] Especially you, because you had to do the

Speaker2: [00:09:58] Garage, you

Speaker1: [00:09:59] Know, is what you inhaled out there? Well, it was probably some multi-species because

Speaker2: [00:10:04] I tell you, we had I had I had some. I had some vibrant, multi-species cameras out there. The things I did not know. We're living in our garage and was glad to have lived in ignorance until a couple of days ago. So hey, but let's talk about our guests this week, you know who probably keeps it pretty tidy garage. Our guest this week, Sheena Wilson. That's right. University of Alberta, where she

Speaker1: [00:10:27] You know what a funny coincidence, because we actually talk about garages in the podcast we

Speaker2: [00:10:31] Do.

Speaker1: [00:10:32] That's right. I think it's the only time we've talked about garages. Oh, and that was a spoiler. Oh, sure.

Speaker2: [00:10:37] That was a great moment. No, no. But I'm just saying like, listen for the garage stuff.

Speaker1: [00:10:40] Listen for the garage.

Speaker2: [00:10:41] Yeah, observation from Sheena. Yeah. But so Shane is at the University of Alberta. She was one of the co-founders of the Petrol Cultures Working Group there, along with friend of the Pod and Rosamond and and others. And I think that that community is really thriving and it's thriving in no small part due to the terrific laborers and inspiring intellect of Sheena Wilson. And we're talking about her new this big new network that she got a massive grant for called Just Powers, which is really focusing on coming at energy humanities from a feminist and decolonial perspective. And we talk about her critical approach to petrow feminism and to just petro culture. More broadly, it's a pretty great conversation. She is a

Speaker1: [00:11:24] Delight. And you're not pretty great. Very great.

Speaker2: [00:11:28] Yeah, totes. And I will say the one thing we didn't mention in the podcast itself, probably because we were a little too afraid to. And maybe we were also not sure how it would come across was the fact that, like, she has terrific eyeglass frames, always. She's always got these amazing eyeglasses on, and we just wanted to know, you know, how we could up our eyeglass game a little bit. Right, our frame game?

Speaker1: [00:11:51] Well, you know, I have a theory, but we're

Speaker2: [00:11:53] Here to tell. Or maybe we just got distracted with more.

Speaker1: [00:11:56] I have a theory, though, that the humanists in general not to stereotype, but in general, I guess as a stereotype, have the best frames look way better than the social scientists, like even the hippest anthropologist or human geographer. We're fucking, I mean, we're garbage. Well, I don't know. But then you raised, you raised the specter of architects and that stiff competition to so but Sheena is at the top of the heap when it comes to super cool eyewear. I think they call it eyewear.

Speaker2: [00:12:26] I think humanists have like secret websites in Europe that they can go to to to order these frames that they just like you have to have a humanist password like it's probably still a kind of free Masonic thing, but that's not true, and they probably get these special like passwords to special websites or they can download cool.

Speaker1: [00:12:43] It's like it's like the secret store that I have here that I have never told you about because it's where I go, find it's where I go. Buy gifts for you often.

Speaker2: [00:12:52] You mean the sock store is it actually sells a lot of stuff.

Speaker1: [00:12:57] Actually, I was in there recently and there are a shit ton of songs. Like so many kinds of socks, and I said to Brujo is like, this proves that socks are a gift item because like a good third of the store was full. Was socks stylish socks for sale for your your male companion who needs a birthday present or whatever?

Speaker2: [00:13:17] Yours. Truly, just I just made it through a birthday I won't have to face. I didn't give you any sock deluging for another year.

Speaker1: [00:13:24] Could it happen, though? It was close?

Speaker2: [00:13:26] So when you feel yourself like cocking that gun just like, you know, he's off, stand back, stand down, right?

Speaker1: [00:13:34] Throw a sock instead.

Speaker2: [00:13:35] Yeah, exactly. All right, Simone. Ok, take us to the next level.

Speaker1: [00:13:40] Let's say go Sheena. Hey, everyone, I've been asked to do a shout out and to welcome you all, and so that's what I'm doing, and we're really glad to have Sheena Wilson on the line with us. Hi, Sheena, so glad to have you here.

Speaker3: [00:14:13] Hello. Thank you for having me.

Speaker1: [00:14:14] Yay. And you're all refreshed and just back from holiday. So we're really happy that you took the time to meet with us virtually. Have a good convo. And without further ado, I will turn the microphone over to my co-host Dominic Dwyer, who will present question number one.

Speaker2: [00:14:31] Sounds, sounds so formal when you put it that way. Hey Sheena, it's great to great to talk to you. I feel like you've been on our on our hit list of people we needed to talk to for a long time because you are officially an OG, and I understand that term has become dated original gangster energy humanist. You've been there since the beginning. You helped co-found the Petro Cultures Group at Alberta, which has just evolved and grown in amazing ways. And now you're the PI and a fabulous new project just powers that we want to get into in detail. But you've got to take us back to the beginning because, you know, every superhero has an origin story. So what was it? What was it for you that got you interested in in energy and a critical take on petro culture? Did you grow up with that or was there like a moment of revelation? We were like shit, we got to get, we got to get on this.

Speaker3: [00:15:19] Well, my background, unlike lots of younger scholars working in this area, is not coming out of the environmental, humanities or even energy humanities itself now that it's becoming a discipline in its own right. But I have, for the entirety of my career, studied the representation of human rights abuses over time as those stories develop and interact with politics. And I grew up in Alberta, and I literally grew up spending my summers in the trailer with my dad working on the rig and hanging out with the other kids of the tool pushes and, you know, that kind of thing. So I'm very much from this space. And about two thousand five, I think there started to be a lot of conversation about the tar sands, and there were documentary starting to come out. So one of my areas of specialization is documentary film, Canadian documentary film. I consider myself a Canadian. And so there were these documentary films coming out about what was happening in northern Alberta. And so slowly my work just started moving more and more into into these areas around around the energy humanities. And originally it was, you know, a human, a human rights issue. And now I've moved much more into this idea of feminist and decolonial energy transition. So first, it was an exploration of what is happening, what has happened, how did we get to this moment? That's sort of where petro culture is originates. Somebody introduced me to Imre, then we started up the petro cultures community. And yeah, and now it's history. As they say,

Speaker2: [00:16:53] You made history, which is amazing and well, it's been so great to to collaborate with you all over the years. And I feel as though kind of Edmonton in Houston have respectively or kind of comparatively similar places, just like Texas and Alberta do in their own country's right. We're both these kind of beating hearts of petro culture that are pumping that black lifeblood into the rest of the society and controlling a lot of power from behind. The scenes are not always behind the scenes. Even so, it's a really rich place from which to stage that kind of critical engagement. But she also wanted to just acknowledge that I think in addition to all these amazing organizational and intellectual contributions you've made to the field, I think you've been one of our leading diagnostician and analysts of petro feminism. And I think that I always think of your work is being particularly vibrant in that area. So do you want to talk to us a little bit about petro feminism, what that means to you and kind of how you got on that particular chemo trail?

Speaker3: [00:17:55] So it's quite funny. Recently, I went to meet, you know, very senior professor emeritus that I didn't know from one of the science fields. And he's part of the Sierra Club, and he called another retired professor who happens to know me quite well. And he said, I'm meeting this woman and she's a petro feminist. What the hell, the petro feminist? What am I supposed to say? And so that's great coffee shop. And he's a real character, right? And he's upset about a new solar project going in the River Valley. So he tells me this story, and he brought his buddy along, and I said, Well, just to be clear, I'm not a petro feminist. I'm actually very critical of Petro feminism, so I just want to clarify that, right? But I guess what I what I thought about early on, you know, when we started this petro culture's research group emerged, I really expected like, we'll run a small workshop that sounds good. Maybe we'll have like 30 people. We'll have this intimate setting and it'll be great. And we put out the call for papers and we got over two hundred responses from all over the world. And we kind of looked at each other and said, I think we're on to something. And everybody felt they were doing this. All by themselves and felt very alienated from everyone else in their departments, and so everybody had this very similar story, and yet we clearly were not the only ones thinking about this right? And part of that process of looking through all of those two hundred abstracts was the fact that I looked at that and I said, Wow, you know, these are things we are all thinking about. You know what, what what is not being talked about in these two hundred pieces? And I do I have studied women's literature, women, documentary filmmakers.

Speaker3: [00:19:26] And so that is also been a through line of all of my critical work. And so I thought, well, one thing that is clearly a gap here and all of this fabulous research is that nobody's really focusing on any of this from a feminist angle, which is something that I can bring to that, right? There were lots of papers on Burtynsky and, you know, Epstein and all these different kinds of things. And so so I really kind of quickly started moving into this exploration of what what did it mean? And at first, I mean, I had to think really hard. I had all these notes and like, what does it mean? How has it shaped like definitions of womanhood? Like what? How has it even shaped the feminist movement itself? And I gave a lot of thought even to the fact that really, you know, feminism as a movement also parallels those timelines of petrol culture, right? For the last couple of hundred years, one hundred and fifty years. Right. So I started immediately giving a lot of thought to that. And then I've I've moved and shifted a lot and how I think about these things. And now, really, for me, feminism is really a politics around which I think that the energy movement needs to organize itself in order to really achieve social justice. Because for me, any any energy transition that doesn't deal with these fundamental intersectional social justice, you know, issues that are core to feminist values for me as a failed transition, right, that that transition, this is a moment of opportunity. And I and I think that we really need to seize the remaking of power infrastructures to also reshape the power infrastructures and social relations of our lives.

Speaker2: [00:20:57] Right on. Right on.

Speaker1: [00:20:59] Yeah. Really. Well put. And I wanted to get into thinking through a project that you've been working on recently, and that is because you brought up your original and continuing focus on documentary film and those forms of media and how we can extract, if you will, different lessons and paths forward into the future by by kind of analyzing what it is that they're operationalizing in their thought. And so I wanted to turn to this film that you've been thinking through called Colonization Road, which has Ryan McMahon. Am I saying his name Mike McMahon? Mcmahon, yeah. Mcmahon McMahon, Anishinaabe comedian and it's a film by Michelle St. John. Documentary film. And in that you you find these routes and paths through the question of colonialism, imperialism and perhaps even feminist responses to that. So I wonder if you could tell us a bit about that film and your your own analysis of it, how you see it kind of intersecting with your interests in the question of decolonising not just petrol culture, but decolonizing even the largest scale imaginary that we can picture?

Speaker3: [00:22:07] Well, you know, it's interesting because I now work with a lot of indigenous women and a lot of indigenous women activists and indigenous women scholars and people sometimes say, I do indigenous research and I don't define my work that way. What happened to me, which is quite interesting, is that I have always studied, you know, I'm trained as a separatist. I speak several languages. I've lived in lots of different countries. I'm very interested in the politics of multiculturalism in Canada and how all of that functions and how multiculturalism can function to recuperate. People turn them into model citizens and all of these, these kinds of things. So I have studied those things with lots of different communities, so I think I'm attuned to that. But what happened with what's happening in Canada right now is there's a certain kind of politics happening right now around decolonization. We had the Truth and Reconciliation Commission for several years, and it came out with its recommendations and major institutions, particularly academic institutions, took up their burden of responsibility, right? Because many of these historical injustices were enacted by education systems, along with government structures and and other things. And so it's a particular moment here in Canada. And so all of those politics are happening at the same time that I'm studying energy transition and all of those politics have to do with land, with the breaking of treaties and energy projects, whether they're oil projects or a solar project or a geothermal project.

Speaker3: [00:23:38] Those also happen on the land. And so I feel that we can't have those conversations separately. And yet, as you know, we constantly silo all of these conversations and they don't interact. So we're having a conversation about reconciliation. And then over here in another box, we're having a conversation about energy transition or climate change and really these things. So deeply and meaningfully interconnected that we can't talk about one without the other and attempts to do so are, I think, failed on both sides. So I do an analysis of this film Colonization Road, because it allows me to engage with an indigenous comedian and activist and thinker on these issues. But for me, what happened when I started working with indigenous women is that I really felt there were so many synergies between feminism and feminist. My version of what it means to be a feminist in the world and to think in socially just intersectional intercultural ways and the ways that these women were also talking about the world. And so for me, I already I already carried with me a language that was very, much very similar. Sometimes you're in different disciplines and you can't speak to people. I mean, I talked to engineers about energy transition, and I'm writing down acronyms and running home and Googling things and trying to figure out what's going on. We're both talking about energy transition. And yet when I started working with these indigenous women, for me, there was no translation needed, right? I understood very well so when I took this documentary film, and I think with it in many ways about what it really means.

Speaker3: [00:25:14] He's not talking in any way about energy transition, but I'm thinking about energy transition, and this film is talking about what it means to be living in a post-truth and reconciliation moment in Canada and what the infrastructures of our world. The things that we take for granted every day. How those are also processes of colonization, even right down to the road. And so of course, the road is a major symbol in petro culture, right? It allows for our massive automobiles. And it also allowed for the colonization of the country. And so I think with that metaphor for infrastructure, because I'm doing a lot of thinking with feminist infrastructural theory and I think, OK, the road, there's the road. And then there's also the power lines on the solar panels and the geothermal infrastructures and and how in thinking with Ryan McMahon and also it's with the director, Michelle St John. You know how in thinking with them about what they're talking about using the road as a metaphor for colonization, how do we how do I think with them in terms of infrastructures for energy and power and new energy systems as new ways of either colonizing or decolonising our relationships?

Speaker1: [00:26:27] Mm hmm. I mean, I think one of the things that I thought was wonderful in thinking and reading your thinking through this, this film is to first, as you mentioned, recognize these everyday quotidian infrastructures are colonial objects and colonial infrastructures that created conditions in the past and that also continue to recreate those conditions of exclusion, oppression and disengagement into the future, right? And so we need to look at these very critically as objects, even as you say, just right down to the road. And I think it's also important because it's getting at some of what you argue in this particular article, and that is is that these ideas and values of mobility and put those in scare quotes, mobility and freedom are tightly wound up with the ongoing extraction of surplus value from women, indigenous communities, black and brown people, et cetera, the developing world. So I think that you've hit on something really important here in thinking through this idea of trafficking and mobility as central to the kind of continuation of this, you know, cis heteronormative, patriarchal petro culture that we find ourselves wound up in at the moment. So I wonder if you want to talk a little bit about this notion of trafficking and how mobility fits into a larger set of structures of petro petro marginalization?

Speaker3: [00:27:56] That's a very nice summary and reminder of what I'm talking about in the article. So thank you for that. You know, it's this idea. You said something that made me want to just kind of say a nuance what you were saying, you were saying something about. So, yeah, the road is taken up as a symbol. So these symbols of freedom and mobility, I argue, are both fantastical and dreamlike because they are literally used to eradicate through cultural genocide and actual genocide. Whole communities of indigenous peoples. But also the argument that I'm also making is that it's also we're sold a notion of freedom through which we're all I want to say the word enslaved, but it's kind of a loaded word. I mean, we're we're sold this notion of freedom, which then actually tethers us, right? So I think that's what I say in the article. That's how I explain it is, I say, you know, using the road as a symbol, we say that Petro normatively this this life. That we have in the 21st century, that's so fantastic that so many people are resistant to changing and are moving in other ways that really we need to look at that because what we imagine to be freedom is actually this very strong tether to our mortgages to particularly to particular spaces, to moving through the world in particular ways that are already predetermined for us on these paths, right? And that not only did it enable the genocide of indigenous peoples, but that it's also for all of us, for everybody it it is not a freedom, right? This is not a freedom that we are tethered to a certain infrastructure, a power infrastructure in which the 99 percent of us are not benefiting.

Speaker3: [00:29:40] And of course, in that ninety nine percent, there's a wide range of privilege and greater privilege and lesser privilege, but that ultimately the idea that we're all benefiting from how the world functions right now is so corrupted, right, that we can look around and see that this is not actually true. And so, you know, one of the grounding principles of petro cultures are studying petro cultures or things we've talked a lot about in that community is, you know, what does life in the age of oil look like and what actually do we want to save and salvage? And what actually, if we're really serious or truthful with ourselves is not really that great and we can welcome change and a lot of things that people are very worried about giving up a lot of them linked to mobility and particularly in North America, to automobiles. And these the symbol that it represents that really, if we gave those things up, we might have more time, less commuting, you know, better health. We'd be walking more and riding bikes and it would be better for us. It would be better for the environment that we live in and, you know, other species that live in our surroundings. And it could it could be a thing that we welcome. But instead, people are very fearful of losing their auto mobility or their mobility, which I think is very much linked through these American dream Canadian dream notions to social mobility, which is actually increasingly difficult to achieve and we're becoming increasingly precarious. And in fact, you know, wealth disparities increasing the disparity between the rich and the poor is increasing all of the time. So that's what I'm thinking through in that article.

Speaker1: [00:31:22] I think it's a it's a really, really critical point. And part of the reason I was drawn to this argument that you've made is we talk so much as we're analyzing petro cultures writ large about acceleration as a right. The speeding up of of life and of profit and mobility is a really important piece of that. It's actually a kind of related but different piece of it, right? So this kind of focus on speed that we have in so many of these conversations, I think really does need to be complemented by what you're pointing out. And that is this putative freedom to have movement, right? That that's part of the acceleration. Honest mindset is mobility itself. And I think it's it's really, really important. I want to just quote you here because I think this is really you put it really well. You say mobility for some necessarily relies on the mobility and confinement of others. Then you go on to talk about labor extraction and disparities and and so on. So I think it's a critical point.

Speaker3: [00:32:21] I've been thinking through this for a long time, you know, and I've been developing a nuancing what I think about these things. But I was thinking about this, you know, even very, very early on in terms of women's lives and the gendered responsibilities. And there's this idea that we have all these freedoms really, a lot of times, especially women, are really just driving. Mothers, particularly are like driving to soccer, driving to do the shopping, driving to work. And it's like this back and forth, right? This real tether. And so we imagine it as freedom. But actually that that automobile, you know what freedom is that automobile actually really giving us? I don't know something people talk about.

Speaker1: [00:32:55] Oh, but I love I love to ride our bikes around Houston together and speculate on all these, like these tiny white women and these giant SUV plowing down the streets.

Speaker3: [00:33:06] I know, and you know, the other thing that I love to imagine actually is I love to, like, ride through the neighborhoods and look at all of these garages and think, Gee, when we don't have so many cars, what fabulous things can we do with all of these garages, right? I mean, amount of real estate in a city. I think the amount of real estate dedicated to automobiles is I can't remember the statistic. I want to say something like 30 percent or 50 percent. It's a very high percentage of the actual real estate space between garages and roadways and parking lots. So we're really building our worlds to accommodate our cars. You know, let's build our worlds to accommodate better human relations, better interspecies relations, all of those things.

Speaker1: [00:33:49] Yeah, really? Well, put. That's a brilliant point about the

Speaker2: [00:33:52] Garages today and in every garage, just like a huge garage band revolution.

Speaker3: [00:33:58] I think the really interesting and in the inner neighborhoods, there aren't as many garages and many houses actually only have single car garages in the old neighborhoods that are nineteen fifties, sixties, seventies here in Alberta. But man, you go to the suburbs, there's like four and five and six car garage as their whole. Other houses, right? There's like more space for the cars than there are for the humans. You know, it's amazing.

Speaker2: [00:34:17] Yeah. So I wanted to ask you about another one of your muses that you've written on a couple of times, and that's the Canadian Ethical Oil campaign, which I'm sure is a flashpoint for all sorts of political struggle and semiotics struggle in Canada right now. But I think it really gets at this pivot, which is we've seen it in the United States too, obviously, and it focuses on, you know, the economic vitality of the oil industry, all the good jobs that it's creating, how it's helping the working class, also how it's contributing to national security and resilience and sustainability. You know, you hear all of these interestingly, often, you know, to our eyes, probably tortured ethical arguments that are made about why it's important to reinvest and double down on petroleum as the basis of our economies. And I think you go after it in a really fascinating way, and this is again one of your critical routes into challenging petro feminism, but also just into challenging this idea that fossil fuels have kind of liberated us, emancipated us from the slavery of drudgery and hard work and and gender roles and everything else. And that's always was the argument that was being made. You know, since the 1950s, at least, if not earlier. And interestingly, some of those arguments were made for atomic energy to during the same period. So there's that kind of interesting atomic fossil fuel complex there, too. But anyway, I just want to ask you to talk maybe a little bit about this ethical oil issue and and your take on it.

Speaker3: [00:35:46] Yeah, the Ethical Oil campaign is very interesting, so it's now many years old, but it's become really part of common parlance here. So it is a beautiful example of successful rhetoric. If you want to teach your students, you know, rhetoric, I think we can all use ethical oil as an example, except for it's achieving the very opposite of what I would imagine to be the ideal. And you summarized, well, what it does, what ethical oil does is it sells back to Canadians what they want to believe about themselves. So that notion that we're kind of the the the bastion of human rights and social justice, when yes, Canada might be better than a lot of places and people can sometimes get very upset about the kinds of critiques that I make about Canada because they say, Well, look, it's better than lots of other places in the world. And you know, that may be true, but the world is quite an unfair place, and I do think we could be doing quite a lot better and it doesn't. So it sells back to Canadians. This idea that we're socially just that we don't have the kinds of black marks on our human rights record that other countries do when in fact, if you dig or even scratch a little below the surface, this is untrue. And in fact, even at this very moment, Canada and Canadian companies are doing things all over the world that are quite unethical, and maybe even they're doing it less so here in Canada because we have laws to protect against that between countries where there are fewer laws to protect against it.

Speaker3: [00:37:11] Canadian companies also take great liberties because it expands profit margins. So, you know, the Ethical Oil campaign sells back that were this peaceful nation. It also sells this. And for that reason, we should privilege, you know, Canadian oil, and it also sells very masculinist versions of what it means to be in the world. The jobs that this kind of rhetoric protect our high paying, masculine ized labor jobs that are somehow privileged and it's very embedded in a Canadian politic in which typically on the right, we see this right now in Alberta. So we have for four years a labor government for the first time in over 40 years. So Alberta has been ruled by conservative governments for over 40 years, and then it had four years of labor government. And now we're back again to a conservative government elected on the promise that it was going to improve the economy and create jobs. But really, what it's done, I mean, I don't know how many more oil jobs are being created, but certainly many solar companies have gone out of business. And there's this historical practice of eroding, for example, Alberta health services. So we have a public health service in this country that we also identify with and are quite proud of. But somehow, there's always this drive to emulate America, even though I'm sure you could all speak to the problems of not having a nationalized health care service.

Speaker3: [00:38:39] And so there's this erosion and desire to create a two tiered health care system so they erode those jobs. And what that means, typically, is that nurses are laid off. So that's a feminized labor sector, right? They erode education, which is also a feminized labor sector. So whether these bodies are actually women doing the work, which? A lot of times women are the majority of teachers, but even the men doing that work are in a feminized labor force that's been eroded. And there are a whole other ways to build an economy like feminist. Economists like Marjorie Cohn, professor emeritus from Simon Fraser University, has argued many times around all of these politics, looking at oil and petro economies and things that a feminist economic response would be instead to buoy those jobs, to invest in education, to invest in the health care system and to invest in a lot more jobs that are what would be considered the feminized labor sector that are stable, that mean that people don't have to move so far to work. They don't have to travel, they don't have to exploit other things. They're also low carbon jobs. And there they provide a good living. But there are more modest living and that if everybody had access to a more mid-range income and we didn't have such huge incomes for these male labor jobs, which mean a lot of times because the men live away, women stay home creates a very traditional dynamic of the family here.

Speaker3: [00:40:01] So there's also that conservative discourse around, you know, protectionism of the family. So Ethical Oil is implicated in all of that. It's been a while since I wrote those articles, and I don't know that I'm doing it justice. I'm thinking more about the real tensions right now in the province the last few months, right? With these promises for more jobs, but actually just the like. I mean, actually, I don't know who these jobs are for because many people that I know are currently unemployed people working in the solar fields, people working for the government, they've eroded climate. Like the Alberta government, the new Alberta government has eroded like basically eliminated the climate division. Energy transition is like the energy division is maybe sort of hobbling along. Still, lots of the subsidies disappear. So there were these great subsidies for solar panels, and they were topped up by some of the municipalities. All of that's disappearing. And so those solar companies are losing all of their contracts and going under. So Ethical Oil was at one time a rhetorical strategy by Ezra Levant, and he now has this rebel media station. He would try things out, and if they worked, you would often hear Prime Minister Harper repeat them two weeks later. If they didn't work well, then you know, Ezra Levant has had several lawsuits against him for libel and defamation and other things. So, you know, it was just accepted that the public wasn't ready to accept that or not. But there were these very close ties between Ezra Levant and Stephen Harper, the former prime minister.

Speaker3: [00:41:26] So much so that, as relevant, gave up his writing in Calgary for Stephen Harper to run for government. And it's very complicated, insidious relationship between this right wing. I don't know what you'd call it sort of like pop up television station that, you know, took advantage of new media and the internet and other things and has become quite established. And Ezra Levant is an interesting character. He's pretty humorous, and he again tells people a version of themselves, some kind of notion of a past that was more idyllic when we had, like traditional families and, you know, men had stable jobs and brought home big incomes. And that's that's the kind of attitude that it's protecting. But, you know, people often who work in these jobs, their jobs are very important. They do support families and they are very fearful. Don't get me wrong, we do have to take care. But there are lots of organizations like there's the iron ore. Sorry, I'm forgetting the name of the organization, but it's, you know, it's men who work in the oil field who don't want to work in an environment, in an industry that is destroying the environment. And so they've been organizing to retrain and reskill men. Some of these men would be happy to have jobs where they didn't have to leave their families for weeks and months at a time. But many of them also don't have very high levels of education.

Speaker3: [00:42:38] So it is very concerning to them because they, you know, they're worried about the transferability of their skills. And yet there's so many ways they could transfer these skills. There's so many jobs in, for example, the solar industry where electricians can move from the oil field to the solar industry and do this work or the geothermal right. We could do great geothermal work in this province, but that's not the narrative of the government. It's about doubling down and making as much profit as the narrative is that we're going to make as much profit as possible off oil well, we can to fund the transition. But this is actually impossible because they don't charge enough royalties. We could actually charge higher royalties, which would send some younger companies fleeing. And this is what people are feeling about. But we would actually, as a province and as a country, still make as much money if we raise those royalties because the more established companies who've been here for 40 or 50 years or longer, they would still be able to afford to stay. And it would slow down development, which would slow down Canada's carbon footprint and and allow us to even imagine moving towards meeting targets. Because right now, I mean, you know, Canada is going to be looked upon historically as a major, you know, climate criminal like we're all climate criminals. Yeah, basically, I mean, we have such enormous footprint. So I'm going on and on, you're going to edit that. I guess I talked too much, but

Speaker1: [00:43:53] No, it was really

Speaker2: [00:43:54] No. Listen, we want to hear the passion that's. People, people tune in for. I wanted to follow on from that, though, by asking, you know, I think that it seems to be one of the things that's really animating your analytical imagination these days is the question of kind of infrastructures for a feminist and decolonial energy future. And you know, that's something that's very much near and dear to our hearts as well. In the essay that Simone mentioned, which is forthcoming, I just want to give the title of it trafficking in petro normative cities at the intersections of Petro feminism, petro colonialism and petro capitalism, which is coming out in a book, a volume project that maybe you can you can shout out to. You have this really interesting term, which is called glitch free structure that is related to remaking the infrastructures of the present in ways that mobilize for other features. I just wanted to ask you about glitch restructure if you could talk a little bit about that.

Speaker3: [00:44:49] Oh, I would love to take credit for glitch for structure, but that's Lauren Berlant, right? So she comes up with these great terms. So, so that comes from her. But I really love that idea of of identifying the glitch. What is a glitch, right? Or identifying the ways infrastructures work or don't work. Infrastructures are basically invisible to us while they work, and then they become visible to us when they're not working. So I sometimes joke that if we could only get people as excited about energy transition as they are about potholes because we literally have like a pothole like cul like line in this city, right? People get upset when their roads aren't functioning perfectly right. Too many potholes. So. So I'm just thinking about, you know, I think about this every day in so many different kinds of ways. And you know, I work so hard all of the time, not only in the academy and in thinking about the communities in the academy and building community and the academy and feminist ways and thinking maybe about what feminist leadership would look like and trying to really live these politics as I think through them and develop them, but also really engaging with what's going on in the community. Like I do a lot of work serving on boards I had. I'm on a committee that advises the Edmonton City Council.

Speaker3: [00:46:01] I, I work with a lot of grassroots organizations, and so I'm trying to to mobilize these things. And part of that is about thinking about what new infrastructures we need and being able to inform new infrastructure. So I think, for example, of the ways in which I try to be a community builder or a bridge builder, we have this new design community called Blatchford here in Edmonton. It is being built on the Old City airport that's sort of in the center of the city. We have the international airport out past Leduc and then we have one inside and it's been shut down for a number of years. And that large space is now being designed to be a community, and I try to put to the best of my ability. I'm saying, you need to talk to this researcher at the university who thinking about how you bring water into a house so that it leaves the house as either grey water, black water or like recyclable water. And then some of the black water becomes part of a system that can then power the house, becomes part of a, you know, an energy usage like, you know, feedstock for an energy system that powers your house. But those things are new infrastructures, right? Those are new infrastructures that have to be built, and I really want to be part of those conversations as they're developing, say, a neighborhood like Blatchford and let them know what the really great work is going on at the University of Alberta or elsewhere that I know about.

Speaker3: [00:47:18] Because you have to do that from the start. You can't I can't remake my house to have that, you know, it would be more cost effective to tear it down and rebuild, which I'm kind of, you know, getting a little anxious about the amount of really good houses that are being torn down in order to create density and make real estate money. But we won't get into that. And then there's this idea that we can take the infrastructures that already exist and remake them. And so, you know, some of those are the hard infrastructures of how our homes are built, and some of those are the soft infrastructures to the social relations and how we remake those. So for me, the university is one of the main communities in which I spend most of my time. So if I think of it not only as you know, my employer, but also my community, then there's ways in which I, I think, Well, you know, do I? So here's just like a simple example you can make a new institute, for example, right? And I could have a, you know, just power institute at the university.

Speaker3: [00:48:12] Or I can take one of the other existing institutes and I can help to remake the infrastructures of that so that they are adequate to the to the to the situation at hand. And I don't have to build from scratch, right? So I'm always thinking about where we see how things are working and how they're not working. And how do we, you know, I think of Keller Easterling, right? So I think Keller as Sterling's idea of being a little bit shifty or devious in the way that you do these things. And I think about that in relationship to Lauren Berlant notion of glitch for structure. And I think, you know, how do we identify what isn't isn't working and how do we decide where we're going to just tear down and remake? And how do we just take what exists and then modify it slightly in ways that maybe other people don't recognize, always with this idea of, like feminist? Anti-colonial politics, in order to remake our world and certainly in working in the humanities and social sciences, we can deal a lot with the soft infrastructures and with energy transition. So many people are very, very focused on the hard infrastructures and the and the technologies and technology development, and that's all extremely important.

Speaker3: [00:49:15] But there are so many soft infrastructures, our personal relationships and our relationships to our built environments and our natural environments, and all of those things that can be remade in ways that would radically transform our lives so much quicker than waiting for new technologies to be developed, be commercialised, go on to the market, then become probably recouped as some kind of green capitalist project, right, that we need to really think about the soft infrastructures, those places where we can remake our world. And so I focus a lot on that. I think about feminist collaboration. How do you remake the academy in terms of feminist collaboration? How do you remake the academy so that it's more open to feminist colleges that have been long declared or like long ignored and erased, and are even lost to the archive a lot of times because they weren't recognized as real knowledge? How do you do that same thing with indigenous knowledge as and recognise them and bring them into the institution where possible, or remake the institutions so that it's it's open and accessible to those communities in that kind of knowledge. So those are some of the things that I that I think through when I think about infrastructure, including garages, right when I ride my bike around, what do we do with all the garage?

Speaker1: [00:50:25] Right, right? Well, one space and maybe even a soft infrastructure itself on the internet that you're doing feminist, collaborative work, feminist and intersectional collaborative work is in the Just Powers project. And I wonder if you could tell us a bit about how that got started and what y'all are working on and collaborating through the Just Powers program.

Speaker3: [00:50:49] Thank you. Yeah, just powers suggest powers started about two years ago, and it is funded by a tribal council grant here in Canada. A shark. We call them Social Sciences and Humanities Council grant. It also has money from the Canada First Research Excellence Fund, which the University of Alberta applied for as an institution and was given a seventy five million dollars grant to work on energy. And as part of that, they wanted to see interdisciplinary work that exceeded the sciences, so they wanted to bring in energy, the energy humanities team as well. So. So I have funding from that and from Sherk. And actually, I should probably also mention from the Cool Institute for Advanced Study. They've always been very supportive of of my work, and I have a number of other funders, including the Francophone Secretariat, because I'm at the Francophone campus. So we we have these these different funding lines and we have different projects in different community relationships. So Just Powers is an umbrella project that then has several pillar projects under it. We have the Eye Doc project, which is in some ways starting to wrap up or at least morph into something else because the funding line is gone now. But over the last 18 months, I interviewed about one hundred and five people working on energy transition in the province and also peppered a little bit across the country.

Speaker3: [00:52:07] But there was a large focus here in Alberta and in Edmonton, specifically just to both archive what is happening for posterity. So all of this will become part of an open access archive through the University of Alberta, and it'll be maintained by the University of Alberta. I'll hand it off and it'll be there in perpetuity and to orient us to what's happening and who's who's who and what do people want? How do people imagine their futures? I ask a lot of people about I asked every single person that I interviewed. What did they want from the future? And so I learned quite a lot of things on that project. Having it be part of the future energy systems portfolio meant that I also had an obligation to document some of what was happening in the future energy systems project itself, what the scientists were working on and how they were contributing to the future of energy in this province and more widely. So I interviewed a lot of scientists and I would say that, you know, two of my main learnings were that everything that I believed about how we really need to work on changing the soft infrastructures and habits and values and and how we're all living is very, very important because we need to work with technologies we already have because the ones under development.

Speaker3: [00:53:15] If the IPCC said last year that we had 12 years and now it's less, I mean, we need to use the technologies that we have because we don't have time to wait 10 years for the ones in development to be ready to go. And I think a lot of people are worried about investing and things don't want to put solar panels on their house or do this. That and the other thing and don't don't get me wrong. I mean, I know we were all spending a lot of time at SolarCity, and we know there's a lot of problems with all of this, but people are scared to make that first step because they feel like there's going to be something new. It'll be like the iPad. There will be a new one next year, so you might as well wait a year because you'll get a better solar panel or something. And we all just have to act now. So that was a that was a major learning. Another major learning was that, well, I was quite nervous to talk to all of these engineers and scientists. I thought, Man, I'm going have to really up my technological knowledge and things. Is that actually they're looking to the social sciences and humanities for these answers because they're saying, Well, I'm just solving this technical problem. This is up to you guys to solve this, this issue.

Speaker3: [00:54:05] I mean, I don't even understand how one of them said, you know, I even find it kind of hard to read my energy bill and I don't understand how the whole energy system works. I'm just working to do this very specific technological thing, which will improve function of blah blah blah, right? So I thought that that was very interesting, that they're looking to us and then we're so terribly underfunded. And so another thing that I keep saying is that we really need to make this transition now. And what that means is instead of giving $72 million to the sciences and three million to the variety of indigenous and community and energy, humanities and other things, what we really need to do is also have a seventy five million dollar investment in the social infrastructures around how to transition right now because basically most people in my circle and I know that's not everybody, and it's not necessarily all of my extended family, for example, many of whom are employed in the oil sector. But you know, for the most part, I feel like the community here in Edmonton, people really want to embark on energy transition, and they don't know how. I mean, the question that I get at every single public talk is, you know, what do I do? How do I get engaged? And so that's one thing that I learned, and another thing that I learned is that people's imaginary around the future is pretty, pretty limited to their own personal experience.

Speaker3: [00:55:17] We don't even have a real solid understanding of how people live, say, 50 years ago or the knowledge is that my grandmother held and all of the things that she could do. And we also have trouble imagining anything in the future that doesn't replicate the present. And so we really need to exercise that imaginary. So other projects under just powers are really about getting people involved in trying to think the future differently. What does that mean? What does that look like? So I do it with my students, for example, I work with them for a whole semesters or even the whole year. And in that way, we can develop more sophisticated ideas by thinking about what's possible. And I, we have this project speculative energy futures that I run with Natalie Loveless in art and design at the University of Alberta. And that one also, too, is about bringing in artists who maybe don't know almost anything about energy transition. Many of them, for example, have worked on environmental issues and have a passion for these things. But they're coming in because they have like, they're fabulous artists, they're collaborative workers and thinkers. And together we're going to try to work on imagining what the future might look like and target a cop meeting or an IPC.

Speaker3: [00:56:25] We've already been to the IPCC, actually, but, you know, target these major international policymakers using imagination. I mean, really, I think we're not going to if we become extinct as a race, it isn't because we couldn't come up with the latest technology. It's literally because we had an atrophied imagination and we couldn't imagine how else to live in the world. And there's so many communities that we could look to right that that are living much more lower carbon lifestyles right now, even just because they aren't. So they were built, for example, before the automobile, the automobile, those societies were built before the automobile. They're less capitalist. Intensive rates in North America has a lot to learn from communities that might call, say, developing in other parts of the world. So we need to really remake and rethink the ways we we talk about the world and think about the world and think about success and value different things using creativity in beautifully disruptive and dissenting ways. All those things that we really need. We need a lot of dissent and disruption and remaking. So just Powers is doing some of that kind of thing. And then we're doing other really practical things like I currently have a grant from the Eco Trust Alberta and Eco Cities Edmonton to work with Lasseter Francophone because I'm in the Francophone community and I say, Hey, all those things that made the Francophone community really resilient and able to survive, you know, one hundred and fifty years of cultural conflict between the English and the French and who would win and to still have such a robust Francophone community out here in the West, all of those community resilience is can also be mobilized towards remaking our energy infrastructures and the way we think about that.

Speaker3: [00:57:58] So I'm really working with that community to do that. And in doing that, also working with my students to help partner them with a lot of our students at campus and our Francophone students. Now, the demographic there has changed a lot from being dominated by Franco Albertan kids who really are much more international Francophone student body and a lot of kids coming out of French immersion. And so helping them become part of the Francophone community and integrate by being involved in my projects. While we partner with lots of fun, which is a beautiful must be one of the most beautiful community centers in the country and has a café and different things going on there. And there's a lot of different Francophone business organizations that are in there. So partnering there, running a community garden, we're going to think about how to how to change, going to work with an engineering company architects and think about a short term plan, a five year plan, a 10 year plan for what it means for that building to become energy efficient and what it means for our communities to be resilient to climate change.

Speaker3: [00:58:54] So those are just some of the things I. Working on, I feel like I'll have forgotten to mention other things, I'm leaving in an hour to go up to Big Stone because one of our fabulous research partners, Angela Look, had just graduated from a PhD in York at York University in Toronto and come back home a few years ago as just powers was finding its footing. And we've been partnering with her and working with her community and doing interviews there with the elders about what they know, what they've identified about the environment, changing what they want from the future, with their relationships with industry are in things, and we're going to be having a first screening of a documentary film tomorrow, taking back to the community, the work that we've been doing with them and showing them what we've done with it. So I leave for big stone in an hour here, going to a keepers of the water conference up there. So I mean, we have a lot of different things going on and we're working with a lot of different communities. We work with Climate Justice Edmonton, run by a lot of fabulous, mostly young women, young people in general, doing a lot of climate justice work.

Speaker3: [00:59:49] I mean, people are really organized here in the city of Edmonton, and I think that we have Climate Justice Edmonton to thank for that. Yeah, lots of great things going on in the city and we do try to partner and showcase what they're doing, if we can, through the work that we do, which is sometimes documentation for me. This this line between even in the grant application when I made it, I didn't claim to be outside of all of this. I didn't make some kind of claim for objectivity, and I claim that as part of my methodology, because none of this, none of us are outside of this. So there's no sense pretending and I can't just observe what's happening and say, Oh yes, well, we weren't doing it quite right in those years and give some sort of nice report five or 10 years from now. I mean, we have to act now, and I'm also part of these things. So this line between the work that I'm doing to influence what's happening and the work that I'm doing to document it and research it, you know, it becomes a bit blurred sometimes, but it's part of my the ecosphere of my life, right? So.

Speaker2: [01:00:43] Well, one thing one thing you didn't mention is to shout out the podcast. So there's a Just Powers podcast that people who are listening to this podcast might be interested in. Yeah, and it's an interesting format because actually you're you're kind of filling in a gap that I think a lot of people would be really interested in, which is that you're actually reading to people, which is fascinating. So do you want to talk a little bit about that format and how you decided on it?

Speaker3: [01:01:06] So that project is very much about a politics of feminist politics, of citation. I feel as though there's a lot of feminist scholars doing amazing work in these areas, and yet we hear a lot of the same men being quoted a lot. And so part of that is about giving visibility to scholars who aren't being as quoted quite as often and are doing really important thinking. And sometimes it's just because they're really great scholars who we all know and they're doing great work and doing that thematically and then reading it aloud to make it just a little bit more accessible, right? So there are there are scenarios in which, for example, I've even assigned these kinds of things to my undergraduate students, feeling as though it's more accessible to them because they can either read it or they can listen to it, or they can do both. And it's nice to have something read to you once in a while. And it's it's also very interesting because in doing the reading aloud takes a lot more time and you have to repeat yourself and redo things. And then it allows for us to have conversations for the team to have conversations.

Speaker3: [01:02:02] And particularly Jesse Baker, who's a graduate student here at the University of Alberta, working on these issues as they relate to education and how we how we might remake education or rethink education. Since we're training students for a future that may or may not look the same as what we anticipate or want or desire, right? So. So then we have conversations about that and that's been working very well, and I really enjoy doing that. Honestly, it's a highlight of my week. We try to do it on Wednesday mornings and I really look forward to it. And I know that you probably both know how hard it is to find time to actually read. So I really enjoy that. And then we're also moving to more of an interview format. So we have nothing out there on the podcast right now. It's an interview form, but we have actually started interviewing people and began imagining what it might morph into. Although I do really want to maintain a through line of this reading because I really enjoy that. So I hope that other people also enjoy listening to it.

Speaker1: [01:02:55] Well, you bring up a really good point, and we were talking about podcasting before we began this very podcast, and I think it's important to point out that enjoyment of producing it, right? And, you know, reading these, I can imagine that reading these pieces is an intellectually stimulating exercise for you and the group, and going through it and reading it aloud kind of deepens it into the crevasses of our brains in ways that I don't think it does when we're, you know, reading it silently in our heads. And so there's I think there's a real pleasure in this kind of work that you're doing. And I would say it's the same for us here with the podcast. And you know, when we're out a couple of months ago, I guess was out in Santa Barbara, people were asking about, you know, why do you do the podcast? Well, there's a lot of reasons, but one reason is because it's really fun. It's really, you know, exciting and fun for us to be able to talk to brilliant people like yourself and to read their work and think through it. And so I'm glad that you're bringing out the the pleasure piece of this, this climate justice work as well.

Speaker3: [01:03:53] Yeah. And I think our talk is probably come. Into an end, and I think that's a nice place to end, and I would also say that I'm trying in many ways to do that in every area of my academic life because dealing with these topics is so difficult. Teaching them is so difficult. These are really difficult things to wrestle with, like unknown futures and you know, the present that is transforming and deteriorating and people living in crisis. And so I think that we really need to find ways to find joy. And for me, that's also part of the feminist collaboration. You know, doing all of this work may not mean that we save the planet. That's a very anthropocentric way of thinking about the work that we do, but we can create at least some pockets that might be able to be scaled up of communities that model that life can be different and that, you know, slowly remake the infrastructure so that life is more livable for us all.

Speaker2: [01:04:43] Well, put very well put. Sheena, thank you so much for all the work you're doing, all the work you and your colleagues are doing, and it seems like the University of Alberta is just getting to be a more and more exciting intellectual space. I feel like we've interviewed like a dozen people from Alberta in the past six months, and you're all amazing. So as one of the leaders of that movement there. Congratulations to you and your many successes on this terrific platform and an umbrella project. Just Powers will be avidly watching it from down here in this the southern pole of petro culture as it were in Texas. And hopefully we'll get to catch up together again soon, somewhere in the critical petro culture studies network.

Speaker3: [01:05:22] Yes, I'm sure that we will, and I do so appreciate having you too down there doing all of the great work that you're doing and meeting up with you when we do meet up. So thank you for asking me to be interviewed. And yes, thank you for all your work over these last many years.