Dominic Boyer
Rice University, Anthropology, Faculty Member
- Renewable Energy, Energopolitics, Digital Humanities, Sociology, Anthropology, Philosophy, and 21 moreCultural Theory, Critical Theory, Digital Media, Social Theory, Biopolitics, Political Philosophy, Political Theory, Globalization, Social Anthropology, Political Anthropology, New Media, Digital Culture, Anarchism, Humor, Satire & Irony, Sweden, Humor/Satire, Parody, Iceland, Energy (Anthropology), and Ecoauthorityedit
- Dominic Boyer is an anthropologist, media maker and environmental researcher who teaches at Rice University where he ... moreDominic Boyer is an anthropologist, media maker and environmental researcher who teaches at Rice University where he served as Founding Director of the Center for Energy and Environmental Research in the Human Sciences (2013-2019). He recently published Energopolitics (Duke UP, 2019), which analyzes the politics of wind power development in Southern Mexico and Hyposubjects (Open Humanities Press, 2021), an experimental collaboration with Timothy Morton concerning politics in the Anthropocene. With Cymene Howe, he made a documentary film about Iceland’s first major glacier (Okjökull) lost to climate change, Not Ok: a little movie about a small glacier at the end of the world (2018). In August 2019, together with Icelandic collaborators they installed a memorial to Okjökull’s passing, an event that attracted media attention from around the world and which caused The Economist to create their first-ever obituary for a non-human. During 2021-22 he held an artist residency at The Factory in Djúpavík, Iceland, and was a Berggruen Institute Fellow in Los Angeles working on a project on “Electric Futures.” His most recent book is titled No More Fossils (U Minnesota Press, 2023) a discussion of fossil fuel fossils and what is to be done about them.edit
Focusing on the life and death of Okjökull, the fi rst of Iceland's major glaciers to disappear because of anthropogenic climate change, this article discusses the complex relationships between cryospheres and human communities in... more
Focusing on the life and death of Okjökull, the fi rst of Iceland's major glaciers to disappear because of anthropogenic climate change, this article discusses the complex relationships between cryospheres and human communities in Iceland. It asks how distinctions between non-living entities and living beings can off er insights to anthropology, and transdisciplinarily, as a model for recognising mutual precarities between the living and non-living world in the face of anthropogenic climate change. Detailing the authors' ethnographic encounters with Ok mountain and Okjökull (glacier), the authors argue that by attending to non-living forms, and by registering their 'passing' or loss, we are able to document and better comprehend threshold events in the larger life of the planet.
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This is a short play written in the absurdist theater style that became popular in the post WWII period, a time also known as the Great Acceleration when the American model of ecocidal high energy, high resource use modernity was... more
This is a short play written in the absurdist theater style that became popular in the post WWII period, a time also known as the Great Acceleration when the American model of ecocidal high energy, high resource use modernity was globalized. The players here reflect different ways of relating to the climate emergency that has followed in that wake.
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At the brink of ecological emergency, if we suture nature and culture together into a new conceptual beacon (e.g., natureculture), will it illuminate a better path forward? Will there be time for the wounds to heal? Anyone would be right... more
At the brink of ecological emergency, if we suture nature and culture together into a new conceptual beacon (e.g., natureculture), will it illuminate a better path forward? Will there be time for the wounds to heal? Anyone would be right to be skeptical since in the global North there are so many bad habits to unlearn, conceptual and otherwise. But I take seriously the caution of the Neshnabe philosopher Kyle Powys Whyte that apocalyptic narratives favor the colonizer, encouraging the acceptance of extinction over the much harder ethical work of restoring relations of trust, consent and mutual thriving in a deeply damaged world (2018). We need decompositional politics that unmake the ecocidal trajectory that sweeps along those of us living today and recompositional politics aimed at restoring relational possibility (Boyer 2023).
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A discussion (in Spanish) of liberalism and its relationship to the ecological emergency that argues for the need for "decompositional politics." Adapted from the forthcoming book No More Fossils (U Minnesota Press, 2023)
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After Oil explores the social, cultural and political changes needed to make possible a full-scale transition from fossil fuels to new forms of energy. Written collectively by participants in the first After Oil School, After Oil explains... more
After Oil explores the social, cultural and political changes needed to make possible a full-scale transition from fossil fuels to new forms of energy. Written collectively by participants in the first After Oil School, After Oil explains why the adoption of renewable, ecologically sustainable energy sources is only the first step of energy transition. Energy plays a critical role in determining the shape, form and character of our daily existence, which is why a genuine shift in our energy usage demands a wholesale transformation of the petrocultures in which we live. After Oil provides readers with the resources to make this happen
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This essay discusses the craft of writing and also the pressure to write in anthropology today.
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This chapter covers the cultures of energy podcast as collaboration, which delves into the aspect of the listener experience that demonstrates how much expert knowledge and trade talk a person is willing to absorb and familiarize. It... more
This chapter covers the cultures of energy podcast as collaboration, which delves into the aspect of the listener experience that demonstrates how much expert knowledge and trade talk a person is willing to absorb and familiarize. It describes podcasts as listening to an entertaining serialized conversation and the ante is a willingness to learn something about the social world. It also emphasizes that the real pleasure of a podcast is imagining oneself as part of an interesting conversation among voices one likes wherein the content of the conversation can be anything. The chapter focuses on the Center for Energy and Environmental Research in the Human Sciences (CENHS) at Rice University, which does a podcast on energy or environment issues. It discusses the in-person connection as a compelling way of knowing the voice or the pen beyond the page, and beyond the text that one reads.
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You could buy lead theory can be more than it used to be learning anthropologys method in a time of transition or get it as soon as feasible. You could quickly download this theory can be more than it used to be learning anthropologys... more
You could buy lead theory can be more than it used to be learning anthropologys method in a time of transition or get it as soon as feasible. You could quickly download this theory can be more than it used to be learning anthropologys method in a time of transition after getting deal. So, subsequently you require the books swiftly, you can straight acquire it. Its therefore completely simple and consequently fats, isnt it? You have to favor to in this song
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354 These exclusions result, presumably, from his perception of translation as textual rather than verbal or oral. But they also result from a reluctance to engage the metaphor of translation and channeling more broadly. This reluctance... more
354 These exclusions result, presumably, from his perception of translation as textual rather than verbal or oral. But they also result from a reluctance to engage the metaphor of translation and channeling more broadly. This reluctance is surprising in that Robinson here disregards his earlier interest in what the first chapter of The Translator’s Turn refers to as “The Somatics of Translation.” Judith Butler’s recent work might prove instructive for examining the body’s relation to the postrationalist model of subjectivity that Robinson is hoping to develop. In “The Theology of the Touch: Merleau-Ponty and Malebranche,” an unpublished paper delivered at the Orr Symposium on “Religion and Culture at the Start of the Twenty-first Century” (Dartmouth College, 9 October 2001), Butler reminds us that Descartes’s adversary reimagined the scene of channeling as one of touch. Instead of interpreting cogito ergo sum as the moment of subject formation, Malebranche showed that a notion of touch allows us to overcome the rationalist bind. Functioning both mystically, as the touch of God, and secularly, as a model of intimacy, touch speaks to Robinson’s approach in a way that allows the translator’s subjectivity to channel effects somatically. This approach might allow for discussions of the role that gendered and racialized (but not essentialized) bodies play in Robinson’s theory of translator subjectivity.
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Research Interests: American Literature, American Studies, Anthropology, American Politics, Aesthetics, and 15 moreClassics, American Political Development, American Culture, American Political Thought, Anthropology of political participation, Boccaccio, Activist Art, Advertisement, Agenda Setting, Arte, British Studies, America, Carter, Alternate Media, and AMERICAN FOREIGN POLICY DURING DéTENTE
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Higher education's contribution to development in Africa is being threat-ened... by four interrelated weaknesses. First, higher education is now producing relatively too many graduates of programs of dubious quality and relevance and... more
Higher education's contribution to development in Africa is being threat-ened... by four interrelated weaknesses. First, higher education is now producing relatively too many graduates of programs of dubious quality and relevance and generating too little new knowledge and direct ...
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The conditions of the Anthropocene, and the relative novelty of renewable energy forms, demonstrate the experimental plasticity of our era. Existing infrastructures of energy, political power, and capital can resist the more revolutionary... more
The conditions of the Anthropocene, and the relative novelty of renewable energy forms, demonstrate the experimental plasticity of our era. Existing infrastructures of energy, political power, and capital can resist the more revolutionary ambitions of renewable energy to mitigate climate change and promote collaborative energy production, such as community-owned wind parks. Even when states adopt bold energy transition targets, as Mexico has done, the methods of transition can be deeply problematic.
Research Interests: Cultural Studies, Energy Economics, Anthropology, Indigenous Studies, Mexican Studies, and 15 moreEnvironmental Studies, Energy, Energy and Environment, Environmental Sustainability, Indigenous Peoples, Alternative Energy, Natural Resource Economics, International Political Theory, Mexico, Oaxaca, Anthropocene, Hybrid Power from solar and wind energy, Historical Studies, Energy transition, and MEXICO
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In this article, I discuss the three dominant models of conceiving infrastructural futures in the context of the contemporary ecological emergency and what kinds of futures each model enables and forestalls. Gray infrastructure conceives... more
In this article, I discuss the three dominant models of conceiving infrastructural futures in the context of the contemporary ecological emergency and what kinds of futures each model enables and forestalls. Gray infrastructure conceives human-engineered material designs that are able to produce predictable, controllable effects, often at a mass scale. Gray infrastructure also conceives futures that by and large reproduce present Anthropocene relations (e.g., a strict nature/culture divide mediated by technology and human supremacy. Green infrastructure is a more diverse paradigm but generally speaking pursues naturecultural collaborations that seek to bend the Anthropocene trajectory. Still, much of what passes for green infrastructure today fails to challenge industrial-capitalist logics and in this way creates futures that are more reproductive of the Anthropocene trajectory than they intend. Finally, I discuss my concept of "revolutionary infrastructure" as an alternative to gray and green infrastructural imagination. Revolutionary infrastructure resists standardization and categorization but generally appears as local experimental enabling relations, as redirection of potential energy, and as transformational pathways toward non-ecocidal, non-genocidal futures.
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Houston is an impossible, unlivable megacity-built-in-a-swamp. In other words, a perfect habitat for hyposubjects.
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Within 24 months (2015-2017), Houston was struck by three "500-year flood" events, including Hurricane Harvey, the largest rainfall event in US history. In this article we explore how this wave of catastrophic flooding has impacted... more
Within 24 months (2015-2017), Houston was struck by three "500-year flood" events, including Hurricane Harvey, the largest rainfall event in US history. In this article we explore how this wave of catastrophic flooding has impacted Houstonians' emotional and epistemic attachments to their homes, neighborhoods, and city. In dialogue with the anthropology and science and technology studies literature on disasters and its focus on technopolitical regimes of disaster anticipation and risk mitigation, we offer an analysis of the "affective publics of slow catastrophe" that have emerged in Houston in response to a situation that experts and citizens alike fear represents a "new normal" in the context of climate change. We focus on three affective orientations around which floodies are clustering: diluvial individualism (a wounded retreat from public engagement in favor of highly individualized recovery strategies), hydraulic citizenship (an activist political subjectivity oriented around creating better infrastructures of water management), and amphibious acceptance (an emergent affective orientation oriented to learning to live with rather than against floodwater). Although we ultimately argue that amphibious acceptance's time has not yet come in Houston, our fieldwork suggests that the repetitive experience of catastrophic flooding is changing the affective presence of water in Houston.
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The time of hypersubjects is ending. Their desert-apocalypse-fire-and-death cults aren’t going to save them this time. Meanwhile the time of hyposubjects is just beginning. This text is an exercise in chaotic and flimsy thinking that will... more
The time of hypersubjects is ending. Their desert-apocalypse-fire-and-death cults aren’t going to save them this time. Meanwhile the time of hyposubjects is just beginning. This text is an exercise in chaotic and flimsy thinking that will possibly waste your time. But it is the sincere effort of two reform-minded hypersubjects to decenter themselves and to help nurture hyposubjective humanity. Here are some of the things we say in this book: 1) Hyposubjects are the native species of the Anthropocene and are only just now beginning to discover what they might be and become. 2) Like their hyperobjective environment, hyposubjects are also multiphasic and plural: not-yet, neither here nor there, less than the sum of their parts. They are, in other words, subscendent (moving toward relations) rather than transcendent (rising above relations). They do not pursue or pretend to absolute knowledge or language, let alone power. Instead they play; they care; they adapt; they hurt; they laugh. ...
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In recent years, a dramatic increase in the study of infrastructure has occurred in the social sciences and humanities, following upon foundational work in the physical sciences, architecture, planning, information science, and... more
In recent years, a dramatic increase in the study of infrastructure has occurred in the social sciences and humanities, following upon foundational work in the physical sciences, architecture, planning, information science, and engineering. This article, authored by a multidisciplinary group of scholars, probes the generative potential of infrastructure at this historical juncture. Accounting for the conceptual and material capacities of infrastructure, the article argues for the importance of paradox in understanding infrastructure. Thematically the article is organized around three key points that speak to the study of infrastructure: ruin, retrofit, and risk. The first paradox of infrastructure, ruin, suggests that even as infrastructure is generative, it degenerates. A second paradox is found in retrofit, an apparent ontological oxymoron that attempts to bridge temporality from the present to the future and yet ultimately reveals that infrastructural solidity, in material and sy...
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This special collection of Anthropological Quarterly aims to spark new ways of thinking about formations and operations of modern power. Specifically, the articles explore how energic forces and infrastructures interrelate with... more
This special collection of Anthropological Quarterly aims to spark new ways of thinking about formations and operations of modern power. Specifically, the articles explore how energic forces and infrastructures interrelate with institutions and ideations of political power. In the hope of fanning sparks into flames, we juxtapose this process of exploration with the influential paradigm of “biopower” developed by Michel Foucault. All of the essays explore how modalities of “biopower” (the management of life and population) today depend in crucial respects upon modalities of energopower (the harnessing of electricity and fuel) and vice-versa. We emphasize especially the critical importance of exploring the juncture of biopower and energopower in the context of the rising importance of scientific and political discourse on anthropogenic climate change. As human use of energy is increasingly linked to the disruption and destruction of conditions of life (human and otherwise), the tensions between dominant energopolitical systems (like carbon fuel) and biopolitical projects (like sustainability) are increasingly evident, opening new possibilities of anthropological analysis. Both energopower and biopower, we conclude, are entering into a pivotal transitional phase.
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A petropunk horror story. And every word of it is true.
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How the rise of data journalism intersects with political liberalism.
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A petrohorror mythology, a commentary on the forces that solarity must struggle against...
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It has been increasing common to hear talk of the need for “revolutionary action” to break the Anthropocene/Capitalocene trajectory of northern petroculture. Sometimes this talk is deployed by transition oriented political movements like... more
It has been increasing common to hear talk of the need for “revolutionary action” to break the Anthropocene/Capitalocene trajectory of northern petroculture. Sometimes this talk is deployed by transition oriented political movements like Sunrise and Extinction Rebellion. At other times, it is the mild liberal-consumerist “join the revolution” discourse put forward by green capitalist ventures. In both cases it raises the question of what is meant by “revolution” a term that Arendt observed has both radical and conservative valences. As we contemplate revolutionary solarity in the 21st century we must further settle accounts with the legacy of 20th century revolutions, many of which were predicated on energy-intensive and technoaccelerationist principles. In this essay I discuss what should and should not belong to revolutionary solarity and I put forth an alternate ethical and practical horizon of “revellion” in which the violent legacies of revolution are displaced by a politics that seeks to rewire the overheated pleasure circuits of northern civilization toward the pursuit of humbler joys and playful relations.
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This short essay written in 2017 reviews the crisis of liberalism in the United States, highlighting the politics of truth making (veridiction) and the lack of authentication of political elites’ expertise in relation to the lived... more
This short essay written in 2017 reviews the crisis of liberalism in the United States, highlighting the politics of truth making (veridiction) and the lack of authentication of political elites’ expertise in relation to the lived experiences of voters.
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One of the many things that make this short document distinctive is that it is a collective document, the product of intensive work by thinkers committed to addressing the difficult questions we will need to pose—and answer—if we are to... more
One of the many things that make this short document distinctive is that it is a collective document, the product of intensive work by thinkers committed to addressing the difficult questions we will need to pose—and answer—if we are to ever get to a world after oil. It is this kind of collective work that will be needed over the coming years and decades to transition from fossil fuels to renewables, and from a petroculture to the new global culture that we can see just over the horizon.
Research Interests: Cultural History, Sociology, Cultural Studies, Renewable Energy, Wind Energy, and 14 morePolitical Ecology, Environmental Studies, Social and Cultural Anthropology, Cultural Theory, Energy, Energy Policy, Renewable Energy Policies, Ecology, Energy and Environment, Renewable energy resources, Environmental Sustainability, Energy efficiency, International political economy of oil and gas, and Solar Energy
After Oil explores the social, cultural, and political changes needed to make possible a full-scale transition from fossil fuels to new forms of energy. Written collectively by participants in the first After Oil School, After Oil... more
After Oil explores the social, cultural, and political changes needed to make possible a full-scale transition from fossil fuels to new forms of energy. Written collectively by participants in the first After Oil School, After Oil explains why the adoption of renewable, ecologically sustainable energy sources is only the first step of energy transition.
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We cannot fail to use energy transitions as opportunities to rethink dominant political, economic and social institutions. To ignore this dimension is to imperil our ability to dislodge carbon’s dominion and the many inequalities that... more
We cannot fail to use energy transitions as opportunities to rethink dominant political, economic and social institutions. To ignore this dimension is to imperil our ability to dislodge carbon’s dominion and the many inequalities that carbon modernity helped to cement between the global North and South and between metropoles and resource-rich
hinterlands.
hinterlands.
Research Interests: Energy Economics, Anthropology, Indigenous Studies, Mexican Studies, Renewable Energy, and 12 moreWind Energy, Environmental Studies, Social and Cultural Anthropology, Political Science, Energy and Environment, Political Theology, Environmental Sustainability, Alternative Energy, International Political Theory, Mexico, Wind Power, and Oaxaca
This is a feeling forward in a warming world, a looking for light in an aching darkness, a breathing deeply, a telling that whispers around the edges of something difficult to fathom.
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Dominic Boyer talks with Roy Scranton, the author of Learning to Die in the Anthropocene (City Lights, 2015), about how philosophy can help us come to terms intellectually and emotionally with the Anthropocene.
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In a fittingly bizarre intro for these political times, Cymene and Dominic share weird fantasies and actual plans for resistance. We then (11:57) welcome to the podcast renowned historian and ethnographer of nuclear energy, Gabrielle... more
In a fittingly bizarre intro for these political times, Cymene and Dominic share weird fantasies and actual plans for resistance. We then (11:57) welcome to the podcast renowned historian and ethnographer of nuclear energy, Gabrielle Hecht from the University of Michigan, author of Being Nuclear and The Radiance of France (MIT Press). Gabrielle tells us why she first became interested in nuclear power growing up in Reagan's Cold War. We compare fears of nuclear war then and now and explore different historical constructions of " the nuclear " more generally. We talk about her concept of " toxic infrastructure " and how it can apply to places like Flint, Michigan. Gabrielle then explains how France became the country in the world most reliant upon nuclear energy for its electricity and why the French nuclear industry is in now in such a state of panic. We talk about why nuclear energy hasn't lost its utopianism—including as a climate change fix —but why we think the nuclear solution to global warming is a red herring. We turn to Fukushima and Gabrielle reminds us that it's also important to pay attention to the less spectacular but more common environmental and human impacts of using nuclear fuel, including the fate of people who clean reactors under normal and catastrophic conditions. We discuss uranium mining in Africa and the struggles miners have fought to have their " biological citizenship " recognized by their governments. That leads us to talk about the real costs of nuclear energy. And we close on Gabrielle's latest work on toxicity and what she calls the African Anthropocene. Hang in there, everyone, be kind to yourselves and stay strong for the long run of resistance.
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A commentary on Stefan Bouzarovski's "Russia, Europe and the Colonial Present," this short essay discusses the underlying "energopolitics" (Boyer 2014) of the Russia-Ukraine war. Energopolitics are the web of sociomaterial relations... more
A commentary on Stefan Bouzarovski's "Russia, Europe and the Colonial Present," this short essay discusses the underlying "energopolitics" (Boyer 2014) of the Russia-Ukraine war. Energopolitics are the web of sociomaterial relations linking energy systems to political institutions. As in Timothy Mitchell's pathbreaking study of the entanglement of coal and social democracy, energopolitical analysis helps us to see how struggles over energy resources, and the conditions of possibility set by their material forms, can exert potent yet seemingly invisible force over political dynamics and ideas. Energopolitics offers an alternative lens through which to analyze the stakes of the Russian invasion of Ukraine in terms of Russian energy strategy and Ukrainian energy resources.
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Thanatophobia (or death anxiety) has long been a concern of psychoanalysis. Melanie Klein, for example, held that fear of death was the primary source of all anxiety. In this chapter, I explore thanatophobia as a way of making sense of... more
Thanatophobia (or death anxiety) has long been a concern of psychoanalysis. Melanie Klein, for example, held that fear of death was the primary source of all anxiety. In this chapter, I explore thanatophobia as a way of making sense of the unreasonable, indeed maniacal, attachment of the global North to fossil fuels despite mounting signs that the trajectory of fossil civilization will lead to ecological collapse (and widespread death). Building on Stephanie LeMenager's analysis of the affective terrain of petroculture, I argue that high carbon path dependency is evidence of an irrational attachment to the pleasures and luxuries of fossil-fueled modernity, especially in those parts of the world that have benefited the most from them. This attachment involves a deep fear of existential loss-not only of profits but of a whole way of life-were fossil fuels to disappear entirely. Thus, death anxiety helps to explain what I term here "petromania" - the hallucinatory state of the global North that its intense energy use and growthoriented economics can be extended infinitely into the future.
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The anthropological literature on experts and cultures of expertise has paid significant attention to the complex epistemic relations within fieldwork situations, how for example, intellectual partnerships mediated the interpretation of... more
The anthropological literature on experts and cultures of expertise has paid significant attention to the complex epistemic relations within fieldwork situations, how for example, intellectual partnerships mediated the interpretation of cultures and research partnerships with experts can overturn conventional divisions of labor between “theory” and “data.” This kind of reflexive attention is less common in the anthropological literature on energy, perhaps due to the extraordinarily urgent existential questions wound up in studying phenomena like climate change and energy transition. At times, it seems, energy anthropology does not believe it can afford the indulgence of reflexivity. And yet, fossil energy elicits its own unique epistemic challenges of “studying sideways” (Hannerz 1998), especially in the context of critical anthropological engagements with petroculture (e.g., Coronil 1997, Sawyer 2004, Appel 2019). In addition to the generally heavy carbon footprint of northern academic life—e.g., sprawling campuses and conference life—anthropological research practice is arguably one of more routinely carbon heavy disciplines because of its pragmatic reliance on extensive translocal transportation and high energy data infrastructures. Critical reflexive attention to energy spotlights the ubiquity of petroculture as coeval socio-material-infrastructural context in which much field research unfolds. In this paper, I discuss what it means to practice critical energy anthropology in the shared sideways context of petroculture. And I ask what strategies exist, what reforms might be necessary, to avoid the coeval becoming coevil in a moral sense.
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The anthropological literature on experts and cultures of expertise has paid significant attention to the complex epistemic relations within fieldwork situations, how for example, intellectual partnerships mediated the interpretation of... more
The anthropological literature on experts and cultures of expertise has paid significant attention to the complex epistemic relations within fieldwork situations, how for example, intellectual partnerships mediated the interpretation of cultures and research partnerships with experts can overturn conventional divisions of labor between “theory” and “data.” This kind of reflexive attention is less common in the anthropological literature on energy, perhaps due to the extraordinarily urgent existential questions wound up in studying phenomena like climate change and energy transition. At times, it seems, energy anthropology does not believe it can afford the indulgence of reflexivity. And yet, fossil energy elicits its own unique epistemic challenges of “studying sideways” (Hannerz 1998), especially in the context of critical anthropological engagements with petroculture (e.g., Coronil 1997, Sawyer 2004, Appel 2019). In addition to the generally heavy carbon footprint of northern academic life—e.g., sprawling campuses and conference life—anthropological research practice is arguably one of more routinely carbon heavy disciplines because of its pragmatic reliance on extensive translocal transportation and high energy data infrastructures. Critical reflexive attention to energy spotlights the ubiquity of petroculture as coeval socio-material-infrastructural context in which much field research unfolds. In this paper, I discuss what it means to practice critical energy anthropology in the shared sideways context of petroculture. And I ask what strategies exist, what reforms might be necessary, to avoid the coeval becoming coevil in a moral sense.