How do we understand culture as a factor in struggles over key environmental outcomes? How do messages about community function, both to provide resilience in the face of political ecological change and to sustain conditions that lead to environmental despoliation, exploitation, and political subordination? What is the relationship between rhetoric and perceived interests, as these interests are constructed, contested, and re-interpreted in contexts of environmental, cultural, and political economic conflict?
In my scholarship, I use cultural studies methods to explore some of the most environmentally contentious issues that face us today: decarbonization of energy industries and watershed issues that involve trade-offs between legitimate human values. In both cases, I deal with industrial and environmental legacies that both shape what is materially possible and the communities of sentiment that shape what is perceived to be realistic or desirable. In my public writing and engagement, I aim to foreground the vivid human, cultural, social, and political dimensions of topics that others writers often address in ways that are inaccessibly technical, opaque, or abstract.
My book-in-progress Dysfunctional Attachments examines how energy communitarian sentiment, energy nationalism, and energy sectoral protectionism have come to take their current forms in Appalachia.
My second book-in-progress is a collaborative project with physicist and science writer Jim Trefil, which addresses the ways that incremental improvements to solar technologies are driving an unprecedented global adoption of these technologies. Our goal is to increase scientific and technological literacy about energy technologies, while situating our current moment in its social and historical context.