Awards

Energy Transitions Through the Fortunes of Labor: The Cases of South Africa and Mexico

"Energy justice of sociotechnical imaginaries of light and life in the bush"

This paper tells the story of off-grid remote renewable energy rollouts in Indigenous communities in Northern Australia. While the analysis is specific to Australia, it has broader lessons about incorporating Indigenous governance approaches into renewable energy rollouts so that Indigenous communities in financially constrained contexts share in the intended benefit of installed electricity systems. Using energy sociotechnical imaginaries and energy justice, the paper explores the emergence, impact and contemporary legacy of Bushlight (2002–2013), a government funded renewable energy program delivered by an Indigenous-led non-profit organisation. Bushlight was part of Australia’s early efforts to build its renewable energy sector, operating with a dual mandate of decarbonisation and community development in Indigenous Homelands communities. Research draws on empirical data from qualitative research methods (interviews and participant observation) as well as archival records and other documentation. The analysis of sociotechnical imaginaries explains how collectives come together to anticipate and address distributional justice issues through policy development and how these collectives and their vision for renewable energy evolve through implementation. Tracing how these imaginaries extend into the present highlights the influence of broader socio-political dynamics shaping Indigenous-settler- colonial relations. The paper’s findings have important implications for decolonisation, supporting Indigenous people to live on and care for Country while retaining their right to essential services.

"Cracking Appalachia: A political-industrial ecology perspective" (2025). Annals of the American Association of Geographers

This article presents a political-industrial ecology (PIE) analysis of a petrochemical ethane cracker plant located above the Marcellus Shale basin near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The analysis is motivated by community concerns that the cracker is more than just a plant and that current regulatory practices render the broader petrochemical ecosystem within which the plant exists largely unknowable. By integrating theory and methods from urban political ecology and Vienna School social metabolism, I present a metabolic tour of the petrochemical ecosystem to better render it visible and to situate it within the evolving global petrochemical economy. Within Pennsylvania, the plant exists in an ecosystem of more than 20,000 energy infrastructures whose exact numbers and locations are largely unknown due to regulatory practices and exemptions unique to the energy industry. Because of this infrastructure buildout, the Marcellus Shale basin is now interconnected to the U.S. Gulf Coast, Canada, and Europe, resulting in more globally integrated, separate markets for natural gas and petrochemicals. As reconceptualized through PIE, this article demonstrates how metabolism, a resurgent concept within various social and engineering science disciplines, can be a method for advancing community-engaged research by simultaneously embedding industrial ecosystems within place and assessing their broader socioecological significance.