After Petrocultures | Nach den Petrokulturen

After Petrocultures

While we are seeing a global push towards renewable energies and more sustainable and just ways of worldmaking, we are still entrenched in the aesthetics, politics, and narratives of Petroculture—“citizens and subjects of fossil fuels through and through” (Szeman and Boyer 2017). What does Petroculture feel like? Where can we see it? Which stories does it tell?Drawing on the interdisciplinary research field of the Energy Humanities, this seminar explores how fossil fuels and petrochemicals have shaped modern life—and how their cultural, aesthetic, and political logics might be challenged or reimagined. In the face of a raging ecological crisis and the resurgence of far-right governments that are renewing the imperial desires of the oil age, fueled by climate denialism, projecting a world “after petrocultures” is crucial and requires two interrelated steps. As the editors of the field-defining volume Energy Humanities argue:

“What we need to do is, first, to grasp the full intricacies of our imbrication with energy systems (and with fossil fuels in particular), and second, map out other ways of being, behaving,and beloning in lreation to both old and new forms of energy. The task is nothing less than to reimagine modernit, and in the process to figure ourselves as different kinds of beings than the ones who have built a civilization on the promises, intensities, and fantasies of a particularly dirty, destructive form of energy.” (Szeman and Boyer, Energy Humanities, 2017) 

This entails an analysis of the ways in which dominant energy paradigms can be traced not in just in economic and political systems, but also in literature, art, and architecture. Energy paradigms are always also cultural and the ways we materialize, represent, and narrate our worlds and values are evidence. In this course, we will learn to both recognize the systems of petrocultures—including their structural inequalities and their aesthetic traces—and to work with speculative fictions and conceptual estrangements that might help imagine different worlds.

This course is designed as an interdisciplinary collaboration with the Department of Sociology and will be co-taught with Prof. Dr. Susann Wagenknecht. Readings will be drawn from texts and other media related to, among other concepts, carbon democracy, petromasculinity, solarpunk, environmental justice, plastic modernity, and ecotopia. The second half of the semester will involve group work towards a speculative exhibition around the end of fossil fuels, which will be featured at the Petrocultures 2026 conference at TU Dresden in August.

Requirements for this course:

• Regular attendance in weekly sessions
• Careful preparation of readings for every session
• Openness to interdisciplinary learning
• Participation in group projects
• Curiosity about possible worlds after petroculture