Patrick Jørgensen defends his PhD thesis
Patrick Jørgensen defends his PhD thesis "Local Participation in Global Energy Transitions, The Common Sensing of Energetic Relations".
The defense is public, all are welcome. The defense will last no longer than three hours and it will be in English.
The Doctoral School og People and Technology will host a reception after the defense, at 16.00-17.30.
Assesment Committee
PhD Assesment Commitee:
- Professor Nathan Sayre, Center for Science, Technology, Medicine & Society, Department of Geography, UC Berkeley, United States
- Professor Laure Kloetzer, Institute of Psychology and Education, University of Neuchâtel, Switzerland
- Professor Ernst Schraube, Department of People and Technology, Roskilde University, Denmark (leder af bedømmelsesudvalget)
PhD Supervisor:
- Professor Erik Axel, Department of People and Technology, Roskilde University, Denmark
Abstract
The global green energy transition is in a sense always local. The transition from fossil-based to renewable energy production and consumption always takes place somewhere involving somebody. This study is about local participation in global energy transition. The possibility of active participation in political processes shaping contested energy transitions. It is a study rich in theory, but at its heart are people doing the work, at times struggling to meaningfully influence the energy future taking shape.
The significance of active participation is premised on reframing green energy transitions from a technocratic shift in energy fuels—black to green energy—to a relational understanding of energy transitions as metabolic processes that fundamentally shape world ecologies, everyday life, and human subjectivity. If energy transitions shape planetary life, then the democratic imperative of collectively influencing these processes is sharpened. The research was established as an Industrial PhD, funded by the Danish Innovation Fund under its focus on “lasting sustainable solutions” in accordance with the Danish Climate Act.
The project took the form of an exploratory research collaboration centered on renewableenergy initiatives developed through local participation. This research collaboration was
spurred by these research questions: How does the concurrent market-based approach shape a municipal utility’s work of developing participation in local green energy transitions? What is the value of local participation in the development of a renewable energy community? What are the possibilities for local participation to shape global energy transitions?
The empirical analysis of the local participation is based on an exploratory research collaboration spanning over three years. First empirical analysis follows a municipal utility’s
attempt to develop a participatory renewable energy project amid a war-induced global energy crisis, demonstrating how uneven possibilities for local participation also affect professionals working to create opportunities for public participation. The study then turns to the empirical heart of the dissertation: the development of Skaarup Sustainable Energy Community. The analysis traces the workgroup, the rope holders, and exploratory work through the municipal and local trajectories as they intersect and ultimately collide in differing energetic judgments over the value of local participation.
The dissertation’s main contribution is a deepened understanding of the concrete ways in which possibilities for participation in market-based green energy transitions are shaped through movements of restriction and exploration. Restrictions are understood as instances in which local participants are constrained from actively influencing local energy projects; I identify these moments of restriction as occurring through a defensive invisibilization, whereby the conditions for shared influence are rendered inaccessible to participants.
Exploration is participating in the collaborative work of rendering legible alternative energetic relations, affording the possibility for mo(ve)ments of common sensing. The conceptualization of participation in market-based energy planning and in the exploration of energetic relations—as contradictory, yet ultimately inextricable aspects of energy work—is founded on a transdisciplinary framework bridging critical ecological psychologies and energy humanities: the former attending to subjectivity and activity in everyday life amid planetary emergency, the latter concerned with rendering energy's invisibility legible for critical social analysis and transformation.
I theorize how the defensive invisibilization of market-based energy transition restricts active participation by probing the scientific ideal of efficiency in planning identified by Horst Rittel and Melvin Webber, through Cara Daggett’s critique of efficiency as political rationality. Empirical material shows how this invisibilization creates blinding conditions for participants, demonstrating exploration as a significant yet underdeveloped aspect of participatory energy transition. The theoretical work draws on Erik Axel’s understanding of exploration as metabolic processes, integrating insights from the energy humanities. These exploratory aspects of emotion and affect, subjectivity, and energetic relations are contextualized in relation to participation in exploratory collaborations.
Drawing on a comparative case study of community-based energy initiatives in Northern California, conducted as part of the study’s empirical fieldwork in the fall of 2023, the dissertation concludes by theorizing local participation’s possibility to shape global energy transition through the concept of common sensing: the ability to locally counter the blinding power struggle over a global common sense—which Imre Szeman theorizes as historical actors competing to define the renewable future in ways that preserve the status quo. As an alternative energy logic for socially modifying our energetic relations, mo(ve)ments of common sensing oppose this common sense as an energetic trajectory defined by history’s actors, offering instead a principle developed by local participants relating their differences within a planetary ecology.
Directions
Find your way around Roskilde University campus