Energy Communication: Theory and Praxis Towards a Sustainable Energy Future

ABSTRACT

This essay comments and expands upon an emerging area of research, energy communication, that shares with environmental communication the fraught commitment to simultaneously study communication as an ordinary yet potentially transformative practice, and a strategic endeavour to catalyse change. We begin by defining and situating energy communication within ongoing work on the discursive dimensions of energy extraction, production, distribution, and consumption. We then offer three generative directions for future research related to energy transitions as communicative processes: analysing campaigns’ strategic efforts, critically theorizing energy’s transnational power dynamics, and theorizing the energy democracy movement.

KEYWORDS:

• Activism
• climate change
• energy communication
• energy democracy
• just transitions

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Leah Sprain and Andrea Feldpausch-Parker for their contributions to our thinking about energy democracy.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Cristi Horton http://orcid.org/0000-0001-5949-7654

Notes

1. Energetic communication (Del Gandio, 2012; Lee, 2012) does not immediately fit within this framework but can inform how discourse on energy resource systems often emphasizes their energetic, or vibrant and generative, qualities.

2. Energyimpacts.org compiles a directory of social science energy researchers.

3. The Trump administration’s actions add a new tenor to many United States movements.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Science Foundation STS Division [grant number SES 1329563] and National Science Foundation STS Division [grant number SES 1550227].