Isabelle Boucher (MA in Philosophy) is a PhD candidate in Communication Studies at Concordia University. Drawing on feminist STS, environmental humanities, and political ecology, her research project examines the grammars of energy in the context of climate change mitigation strategies. Her current focus is on analyzing how Western epistemologies and ontologies, imbued by information theory and Earth System Science’s cybernetic understanding of our planet, are shaping climate action and technological agencies. By considering the triangulation of knowledge, power, and aesthetics through their colonial and extractive histories, she highlights the critical intersection of environmental and social justice issues and argues for the importance of epistemic justice at the heart of decolonial energy imaginaries. She published in journals such as Heliotrope, Public, and Utopian Studies.
In her contribution to the graduate student roundtable, she asks: What are planetary energetics? How can embodied practices help us rethink the energy transition and (re)situate planetary relations and governance in the context of climate change. She defines ‘planetary energetics’ as modes of knowing, valuing, and organizing the energy transition—a set of conditions for the present and aspirations for the future of this warming planet. It is at once the framework of dominant energy politics—as capitalist and colonial projects—and an embodied positionality that can critically rethink scale and praxis for climate action and waste practices. After briefly presenting some examples of how dominant knowledge about energy moves us away from the conditions of a just transition, she will explore tentative avenues for embodied energy practices.