Politics 375: Global Energy Politics

“Energy” shapes our everyday lives. By its very nature, energy can simultaneously be totalitarian and liberating making it both a contentious and fascinating topic of study. Its politics are filtered through multiple levels of governance and geopolitics, local policy decisions, physical and natural properties, technologies, livelihoods, labor and industrial practices, scientific experiments, and societal structures. In the last five decades, climate change has made us reimagine our relationship with energy sources. This course with explore different energy sources like coal, oil, gas, hydro, solar, wind, geothermal, and nuclear as political objects, and we will engage with these energy sources in two parts: (1) a rigorous reading and analysis of critical energy studies from different geographies, histories, and contexts, and (2) a community-based learning of energy resources in Walla Walla.