Sociology and Criminology events
Saharan Winds: Energy Systems and Aeolian Imaginaries in Western Sahara
Abstract: Saharan Winds (West Virginia Press, 2024) focuses on the role of wind imaginaries—how we understand wind and the meanings we attach to it —in determining the wider politics, whether oppressive or just, associated with energy systems. This book turns to various cultures and communities across different time periods in Western Sahara to explore how wind imaginaries affect the development, management, and promotion of wind farms; the distribution of energy that wind farms produce; and, vitally, the type of politics mediated by all these elements combined. Highlighting the wind-fuelled oppression of colonial energy systems, the book shows the potential offered by nomadic, Indigenous wind imaginaries for contributing to a fairer energy future.
Biography: Joanna Allan is based in the Centre for Global Development at Northumbria University. Her research focuses on resistance to neocolonial natural resource exploitation, histories of women's anti-colonial resistance movements, Saharawi and Equatoguinean resistance literatures, environmental justice, and the relationship between energy and culture. She is also author of Silenced Resistance: Women, Dictatorships, and Genderwashing in Western Sahara and Equatorial Guinea (Wisconsin University Press, 2019).
Chair: Dr Alice Wilson ,University of Sussex
Discussant: Dr Andrea Brock, University of Sussex
Andrea Brock is Assistant Professor in International Relations at the University of Sussex. She is a political ecologist and political economist with interest in the relationship between extractivism, infrastructures, corporate power, and state violence; and how these are linked to ecological and social harm. She has conducted research on coal mining, hydraulic fracturing, renewable energy generation, the political ecology of High Speed Railways in the UK, as well as policing and criminalisation of (ecological) dissent.