Introduction: Contesting the moral worlds, scales, and epistemics of energy transitions

Abstract

The introduction to this special issue, Contesting Transitions: New Directions in the Anthropology of Energy, Climate Justice, and Resource Imaginaries, takes stock of the current state of debate within anthropology and allied fields over the contradictions, slippages, and inequalities at the centre of the global energy transition. Across a wide range of critical case studies, the contributions underscore the importance of attending to what is being elided by dominant discourses and forms of production, such as alternatives to socio-material understandings of energy and resistance to the inevitability of extractivism as the basis for new ways of living. Even more, the collection takes up and problematizes the concept of ‘transition’ itself on historical, ethnographic, and epistemological grounds. After describing the themes that emerge from the special issue, and explaining how these themes point toward new configurations of research, theory-building, and critical intervention, the introduction concludes with a broader argument about the indispensable place of a critical anthropology in debates over energy and Anthropocenic harm.