Energy geographies: thinking critically about energy issues in the classroom

Abstract

Energy issues are becoming increasingly common subjects of instruction in undergraduate- and graduate-level classrooms across a variety of disciplines. The interdisciplinary character of energy studies provides geographers with a great opportunity to present different applied and theoretical approaches to help students conceptualize energy issues from a critical perspective. This article presents a class intervention as an example of how to incorporate geographic concepts and political economic theory into the classroom to help students understand the social, political, economic, and environmental implications of energy production, distribution, and consumption at multiple scales from a critical perspective.

Keywords:

• Energy geographies
• political economy of nature
• spatial fix
• second contradiction of capitalism
• scarcity
• critical resource geography

Acknowledgments

The author would like to thank Christian Delgado and Mathew Novak for helpful comments and guidance on previous drafts. Special thanks to Conor Harrison and Autumn Thoyre for organizing the panel session, from which this manuscript evolved, for their helpful comments, and for organizing this symposium issue. Finally, the author would like to thank the three anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments, suggestions, and constructive criticism. All mistakes and omissions are the author’s.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. A thorough review of the literature on debates regarding the linkages between research and teaching is beyond the scope of this article. A detailed description may be found in Jenkins (2000) and Healey (2005).

2. It is not the intention of the author to provide a comprehensive description of these basic geographic concepts (i.e., space, place, and scale) in this article. For a detailed analysis of these concepts and a conceptual framework applied to “geographies of energy transition” see Bridge, Bouzarovski, Bradshaw, and Eyre (2013).

3. The author’s goal is not to prove the uniqueness of this intervention. Instead, his objectives are to invite other instructors to adopt political economic theory in the classroom, provide some insights of how to simplify the complexity of this theoretical framework, and suggest examples of how to introduce geographic concepts to help students understand the spatiality and multi-scalar nature of energy systems.