Contentious “Green Transitions”: Renewable energies and geopolitical materials in historical perspectives

This research project aims to explore the energies and materials mobilized for the so-called green transitions from historical and contextual perspectives. It will address scientific designs, environmental impacts, social debates, resistance to technology and controversies between experts and lay-people which have shaped the way we understand, produce and foster those energies and materials.

The project will develop a case study of one of these main areas:

1. Sustainable energies, sustaining economies: Solar energy, wind energy, tidal energy and biogas. Renewable energy is not just a matter of the future. Renewable energies have a history which provides an excellent ground for understanding how technological narratives, global economies, national identities and local demands shape the landscapes in which we live. Studying those energy landscapes in context from a multiscalar perspective provides insight into the growing social resistance to what were once considered “alternative technologies” and “technologies of protest”.
2. Mining new materials, digging into old imaginaries: Uranium, lithium and rare materials. Two key chemical elements are at the center of current climate change debates: Uranium and lithium. These materials deserve to be studied as multi-layered products of geological, environmental, social and historical processes (with prospecting, mining and initial stages of mineral processing being crucial).

In this sense, the voices, silences, and knowledge mobilized by lay-people, social movements, local communities, and migrants must be incorporated when analyzing energy and mining projects.

The PhD dissertation will develop a historical case study or a set of case-studies, with a geographic and chronological scope tailored to the candidate’s background, interests, and linguistic skills.

Academic background:

• Master’s degree in history of science (or related disciplines: especially STS, political ecology, environmental history and contemporary history)
• Previous publications/research/outreach on the project topic are valued but not required

Languages:

• Intermediate-high level of English
• Intermediate-high level of a second language other than English

Skills:

• Collaborative skills, ability to work with autonomy and willingness to participate in local and international transdisciplinary teams.
• Aptitude and enthusiasm to receive the PhD training, to (co)write scientific documents, and to be involved in the project’s dissemination, outreach and data collection activities.

The research project Exchange Zones of Epistemic Resistance and Alternative Innovation: Activism, Grassroots Movements and Expertise, 1970s-1990s (PID2023-150413NB-C21, PI: Jaume Valentines-Álvarez) delves into the exchange zones between activists, grassroots groups and experts, in three main areas:

1. Environment, energy and communities.
2. Body, gender and identities.
3. The city, mobility and urban sustainability. 

Each of these project areas studies two intertwined domains:

1. Local communities and social movements as epistemologically active actors: Through local and transnational networks, their demands and political practices have been closely linked to the production, circulation and appropriation of scientific knowledge.
2. Activism as a driving force of sociotechnical innovation: Opposition to specific socio-technical projects has often triggered a great deal of ingenuity and innovation.

The project brings together 18 members from Spain and Portugal (mainly historians of science, but also including environmental historians, artists and research technicians). Although the project focuses on the Iberian Peninsula and the last decades of the 20th century, other geographies and time periods are also of interest.