Fuel for Thought: On the Energy that Drives Culture
I designed this interdisciplinary tutorial with support from the Mellon Foundation. Available to undergraduates at Pitzer and the University of Southern California, “Fuel for Thought” attracted students from economics, environmental science, and studio art, among other majors.
Our class launched from the premise that forms of energy are deeply embedded in culture—in the content of books, film, visual art, and other media, and in the materials that make cultural production possible. Rather than treat fuel as a background detail, we grappled with the relationship between fuel-power and the capacity to create or imagine.
To that end, course assignments prioritized critical making, a pedagogical approach that promotes critical thinking through tactile engagement, creative scholarship, and digital practice.
Protestors from the climate-action group Just Stop Oil hurl soup at van Gogh’s Sunflowers. London. October 2022. AP Images.
Readings
Our core texts were Jack Kerouac’s seminal road novel On the Road (1957), Denis Villeneuve’s environmental dystopian film Dune: Part One (2021), and Beyoncé’s visual album Lemonade (2016), filmed along America’s Energy Coast, which encompasses the oil-rich wetlands between Texas and Louisiana.
Course content also included works of visual art, news stories, and readings from the Energy Humanities, an interdisciplinary field that seeks to disentangle unsustainable relationships to fuel and imagine new ones.
See sample units below:
Slow Violence
excerpts from Rob Nixon’s Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (2011)
Kyoko Shoji Hearn, “Violence, Storm and the South in Beyoncé’s Lemonade,” in LIT: Literature, Interpretation, Theory
bell hooks, “Beyoncé's Lemonade is capitalist money-making at its best,” The Guardian
Visual Art & Activism
Digital Exhibition: Judy Natal, Another Storm is Coming
Aja Romano, “How many van Goghs is one Earth Worth?” Vox
Esther Addley, “British Museum ends BP sponsorship deal after 27 years,” The Guardian
Gregory Barber, “NFTS Are Hot. So Is Their Effect on the Earth’s Climate,” Wired
Petroculture, Identity, and Affect
excerpts from Stephanie LeMenager’s Living Oil: Petroleum Culture in the American Century (2014)
excerpts from Timothy Mitchell’s Carbon Democracy (2013)
Frederick Buell, “A Short History of Oil Cultures: Or, the Marriage of Catastrophe and Exuberance,” Journal of American Studies
Images: cropped portion of a photograph of Woodstock from The Bettmann Archive, Getty Images, screen grabs from Lemonade and Dune
Sample Assignments
Course assignments included kick-writing (writing without stopping, as Kerouac and the Beats claimed to do), taking stock of energy resources expended in class participation in the vein of cultural critic Stephanie LeMenager, and creating a visualization of an energy system, defined as the “technological, social, economic, political, and cultural arrangements that make energy usable and embed it throughout society.”
Over the course of our class, students received training in image, audio, and video editing tools in preparation for their final project: a collaborative, multimedia exhibition of their work using Scalar.
“Infinite” by Ernst Logar, published in Fueling Culture, eds. Irme Szeman and Jennifer Wenzel (2020)
Flip through screenshots of multimodal student work, created using photoshop, video annotation, pen, paper, and other materials:
Student feedback
“This course was extremely well designed. When I first read the syllabus, I remember thinking there was no way that the class could really connect everything. However, this class and every aspect of the syllabus was woven together very nicely. It turned out to be a way more impactful class that I originally thought, surprisingly nuanced and original. ”