The Carbon Present is … unevenly experienced and imagined

Abstract

How we experience and imagine fossil fuels and their infrastructures plays a significant role in influencing our relationship to them and, in turn, shapes the prospects for transition so necessary for cooling the rapidly warming planet. In this seminar, part of Toolkit for Today: Carbon Present, Jordan B. Kinder explores how the costs and benefits of fossil fuels and their infrastructures are unevenly experienced and imagined in relation to two natural gas pipeline projects: the failed Mackenzie Valley Pipeline and the in-construction Coastal GasLink Pipeline. Contestation over these settler colonial infrastructures has been staged not only over the usual suspects of land, territory, and jurisdiction, but also in terms of conflicting ways of experiencing and imagining energy and infrastructure. Developing the concepts of energy consciousness and energy imaginaries to address these conflicts centred on energy futures materialized through the built environment, this seminar offers a critical vocabulary for confronting the uneven dimensions of our carbon present while accounting for strategies of resistance that offer ways out of this present; a present defined by carbon lock-in and path dependency.

Date
Location
Canadian Centre for Architecture/Centre Canadien d’Architecture, Montréal, QC, Canada