The Center for International and Regional Studies (CIRS) at Georgetown University in Qatar is pleased to launch its newly-formed Energy Humanities research initiative with a webinar titled “Everyday Energy: Approaches to Lived Experience.” The event will feature three area experts in the field of Energy Humanities--Professors Dominic Boyer, Sara B. Pritchard, and Jennifer Wenzel, and will be moderated by GU-Q faculty members, Victoria Googasian, Trish Kahle, and Firat Oruc. The Energy Humanities initiative is a new project under the CIRS Environmental Studies thematic cluster, and aims to provide new understandings of the influence and impacts of energy in everyday lives and stimulate new conversations in the scholarship.

The CIRS Energy Humanities research initiative's goal is to facilitate the emergence of a new focus on energy as everyday lived experience, in order to add complexity and texture to the narratives within the field that have primarily focused on questions of state-building, international relations, economic development, and technological systems. Through close examinations of the relationship between energy, society, and culture from a comparative and transnational perspective, this research initiative calls for new ways of thinking about how we govern energy, how we communicate about it, how we understand the relationship between energy flows and social, cultural, political, and economic forms, and how we understand ordinary people’s encounters with energy in and beyond the nation-state. Examining questions related to the importance of everyday energetic life through the lens of history, anthropology, literature, film, cultural studies, science and political studies the project will identify new multidisciplinary directions for the global energy humanities.