Just Powers Podcast: Recent Episodes
Just Powers
The Just Powers Podcast features readings and discussions of scholarly work focused on the pressing energy and environmental issues of our times.
In this episode, guest-hosts Dr. Sara Dorow, professor of sociology (University of Alberta), and project research assistant Rezvaneh Erfani talk about Canada’s first ever net-zero multifamily social housing project. The North Glenora Sustainable Affordable Housing Project, led by Dr. Dorow and Dr. Arlene Oak, professor of human ecology (University of Alberta), began 8 years ago […]
In this episode, recorded in early 2021, Sheena Wilson sits down with two project managers for Blatchford, a net-zero real estate development on the site of the old Edmonton City Centre Airport. The City had long slated the 200 hectare airfield for a world-class energy efficient community that will eventually be home to 30,000 residents.The […]
In this episode, we chat with the architectural and engineering team from the LA CITÉ RÉSILIENTE project, including Jacob Komar, Principal Engineer with Revolve Engineering, Trina Larsen, Principal at Larsen Engineering, and Shafraaz Kaba Principal Architect with ASK for a Better World.
In this episode, we talk to the organizational team from the La Cité Résiliente: A Decade in Transition project, including research coordinator Danika Jorgensen-Skakum, intern and public outreach coordinator, Laurence Mailhiot, and Executive Director of La Cite Francophone, Daniel Cournoyer. To learn more about the La Cité Résiliente: A Decade in Transition project, visit: https://www.justpowers.ca/projects/la-cite/ […]
This episode features a conversation with Charles Richmond, coordinator for Sierra Club Canada Foundation’s Edmonton chapter and champion of active civic engagement in good governance and empirically-based environmental advocacy in public life.
This episode features a conversation with Rocky Feroe, a retired physician and Board Director & Co-Founder of the Solar Power Investment Cooperative of Edmonton (SPICE).
This episode features a conversation with Cody Sharphead, archeologist and consultation co-ordinator with Enoch Cree Nation.
This episode features a conversation with Davide Dodge, environmental journalist, energy transition advocate, and host and producer of Green Energy Futures.
In the first episode of this series, Just Powers lead Dr. Sheena Wilson and producer Jessie Beier introduce the what, why and how of deep solarities.
This episode features a reading of Chapter 2 from Keller Easterling’s 2014 book Extrastatecraft: The Power of Infrastructure Space, published by Verso Books. In this book, Easterling offers an understanding of infrastructure as the hidden substrate — or binding medium — through which standards and ideas are shared between bodies. For Easterling, then, the notion […]
In this episode we read Ara Wilson’s article “The Infrastructure of Intimacy”, published by Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society in Winter 2016. Bringing together intimacy and infrastructure, this article explores the ways in which infrastructures are involved in social relations and, in many cases, shape the conditions for relational life. “This essay […]
In this episode we read Selena Savic and Stefanie Wuschitz’s article “Feminist Hackerspace as a Place of Infrastructure Production”, which was published in 2018 by Ada A Journal of Gender, New Media, and Technology (issue number 13). In this article, Savic and Wuschitz approach the question of infrastructure by taking a critical stand towards feminist […]
In this episode we read “The commons: Infrastructures for troubling times” by Lauren Berlant. This article was published in the 2016 (Volume 34) edition of Society and Space, an international and interdisciplinary scholarly and political project hosted by SAGE Journals. In this essay, Lauren Berlant provides a concept of structure for transitional times, with the […]
In this episode we read Deborah Cowen’s 2017 article “Infrastructures of Empire and Resistance”, which was published on January 25, 2017 on the Verso Books Blog. In this article, Cowen explores the issue of infrastructure by focusing on how relations of power and of force rely on socio-technical systems, including infrastructural systems, which are themselves […]
For our first episode in Series III, we are excited to share an excerpt from Angela Mitropoulos’ 2012 book Contract & Contagion: From Biopolitics to Oikonomia titled “Infrastructure, Infra-politics.” In this short excerpt, Mitropoulos positions infrastructure as an infra-political question of how affinities take shape, or not. Or as she puts it, “[i]nfrastructure is the […]
In this episode we will be reading Dr. Nicole Shukin’s 2015 article “Materializing Climate Change: Image of Exposure, States of Exception”. This text is included in the edited collection Material Cultures in Canada, edited by Thomas Allen and Jennifier Blair, and published by Wilfrid Laurier University Press in 2015. Material Cultures in Canada presents the vibrant […]
This Read and Record episode features a performative readings of the zine “Chainsaw: Theory and Practice” by Catherine Lavoie-Marcus in complicity with non-disciplinary artist Johanna Householder. Originally published in 2017 as part of the Viva! Art Action Festival in Montreal and inspired by Householder’s performance work, the zine presents a conversation on the counter-usage of […]
In this episode we will be reading “Performing Sovereignty: Forces to be Reckoned With” by Dr. Carla Taunton. This text is included in the edited collection More Caught in the Act: An Anthology of Performance Art by Canadian Women, edited by Johanna Householder and Tanya Mars, and published by Artexte in 2016. More Caught in the […]
This episode features a Read & Record of Liz Miller and Martin Allor’s 2016 essay “Choreographies of collaboration: Social engagement in interactive documentaries”, from Volume 10, Issue 1 of the journal ‘Studies in Documentary Film’ (Taylor & Francis). In this text, the authors engage in a series of in-depth conversations with socially engaged Canadian directors, […]
In this episode we will be reading “Amateur video and the challenge for change” by Dr. Janine Marchessault. This text is included in the collection “Challenge for Change”, edited by Thomas Waugh, Michael Brenda Baker & Ezra Winton and published by McGill-Queen’s University Press in 2016. The collection offers an examination of the radical politics […]
For our first episode in Series II, we are excited to share a Read & Record of the 2018 article “(Re)framing Big Data: Activating Situated Knowledges and a Feminist Ethics of Care in Social Media Research” by Dr. Mary Elizabeth Luka & Dr. Mélanie Millette. In this article, the authors seek to problematize assumptions and […]
In this episode we will be reading Sheena Wilson’s 2018 article titled “Energy Imaginaries: Feminist and Decolonial Futures,” which can be found in Materialism and the Critique of Energy, edited by Brent Ryan Bellamy and Jeff Diamanti. Materialism and the Critique of Energy brings together twenty-one theorists working in a range of traditions to conceive […]
This Read & Record episode features a selection of chapters from Isabelle Stengers’ 2015 book In catastrophic times: Resisting the coming barbarism. The book was translated from French to English by Andrew Goffey and published by Open Humanities Press in 2015. In Catastrophic Times offers a welcome intervention into the current state of global political […]
In this episode we will be reading “Indigenous Women and Knowledge” by Isabel Altamirano-Jimenez & Nathalie Kermoal. This text is featured in Living on the Land. Indigenous Women’s Understanding of Place, also edited by Isabel Altamirano-Jimenez and Nathalie Kermoal and published through Athabasca University Press in 2016. Living on the Land examines how patriarchy, gender, […]
This episode features a Read & Record of the introductory chapter to Alexis Shotwell’s 2016 book “Against Purity: Living Ethically in Compromised Times”. In Against Purity, Alexis Shotwell proposes a powerful new conception of social movements as custodians for the past and incubators for liberated futures. Against Purity undertakes an analysis that draws on theories […]
This Read & Record episode features Zoe Todd’s 2015 article “Indigenizing the Anthropocene”. This article is featured in Art in the Anthropocene: Encounters Among Aesthetics, Politics, Environment and Epistemology, edited by Heather Davis and Etienne Turpin and published through Open Humanities Press in 2015. In Todd’s article, she insists on an ethical relationality with Indigenous […]
Introducing the Just Powers Podcast! The Just Powers Podcast features readings and discussions of scholarly work focused on the pressing energy and environmental issues of our times. The first iteration of the podcast features a series of ‘Read & Records’ (or R&Rs) that highlight scholarly work by feminist and decolonial scholars that have informed both […]