Speculate, speculation, speculative: What can the Energy Humanities do?

Abstract

As Castell, Willis and Waddington noted at the inaugural ScienceHumanities international colloquium, a number of specialist sub-fields have been negotiating the interaction with the sciences within the humanities for some time, and it is important to learn from, rather than replace, these practices. The now established field of the Environmental Humanities, “a transdisciplinary matrix” in the words of Ursula Heise (Comparative Literature n.p.), is one such practice: as Stephen Muecke puts it in an essay for Latour’s Reset Modernity!, “what about the ‘environmental humanities’ maybe this new subfield has some solutions for reconciling the sciences with the humanities, real-world experimentation with the ‘life of the mind’?” (Recomposing the Humanities 227). In this essay, I will consider what the Environmental Humanities, and particularly its newer relation the Energy Humanities, can teach us about the kinds of transdisciplinary matrices advocated by the ScienceHumanities.