Bradon Smith, “Speculate, speculation, speculative: What can the Energy Humanities do?”

摘要

As Castell, Willis and Waddington noted at the inaugural ScienceHumanitiesinternational colloquium, a number of specialist sub-fields have been negotiating theinteraction with the sciences within the humanities for some time, and it is importantto learn from, rather than replace, these practices. The now established field of theEnvironmental Humanities, “a transdisciplinary matrix” in the words of Ursula Heise(Comparative Literature n.p.), is one such practice: as Stephen Muecke puts it in anessay for Latour’s Reset Modernity!, “what about the ‘environmental humanities’ -maybe this new subfield has some solutions for reconciling the sciences with thehumanities, real-world experimentation with the ‘life of the mind’?” (Recomposingthe Humanities 227). In this essay, I will consider what the EnvironmentalHumanities, and particularly its newer relation the Energy Humanities, can teach usabout the kinds of transdisciplinary matrices advocated by the ScienceHumanities.