Location: TUD Dresden University of Technology (Aug 26-28, 2026)
Keynotes: Alexander A. Dunlap (Boston University); Jordan B. Kinder (NYU Steinhardt), and Kathryn Yusoff (Queen Mary University of London)
Conference website: https://tu-dresden.de/gsw/slk/anglistik_amerikanistik/na-literatur/petrocultures2026
Close to a third of electricity produced globally is now classified as ‘renewable,’ and yet CO₂ emissions from the energy sector are at an all-time high. Amidst surging investments in techno-utopia by an alliance of big tech and authoritarianism, the petro-nostalgia of “Drill, baby, drill!” echoes across unprecedented roll-backs of climate protection policies and new frontiers of extractive development across the planet. At the same time, local and transnational struggles are proliferating and expanding to defend lands and communities threatened by these renewed logics of extraction, articulating alternative imaginaries that challenge dominant energy regimes and open up spaces for more just and ecologically viable energy futures. Our energy present, poised between new and old constellations of technological, socio-cultural, political, affective, epistemological, environmental, and economic infrastructures, reminds us that energy relations are always at once dispersed and situated.
Under the theme of “Situating Energy,” Petrocultures 2026 aims to bring these infrastructural relations to the fore and explicate energy as a matter of concern for a wide array of disciplines in the humanities and social sciences. Drawing on feminist science studies, ‘situating’ is a critical intervention that grounds knowledge practices in the material, ideological, and affective conditions of their production and circulation. To situate energy, then, is to resist its withdrawal into elusive immateriality or dislocated externalities and to render legible the specific contexts, places, epistemologies, and practices through which it is imagined, desired, materialized, and embodied. It is a move that foregrounds how energy is put to work across various modes of worldmaking and -unmaking, from technocapitalist progress narratives and the continued necropolitical regimes of colonialism, to struggles for environmental justice and Indigenous futurities. Framed by the interplay of new and old energy regimes, situating energy requires forms of inquiry that are transcultural, interdisciplinary, and responsive to historical continuities and disruptive futures. It demands not only attention to the frictions, gaps, and resonances between different scales and sites of energy production, consumption, and exhaustion, but also a tracing of its articulation in the conflicting narratives, politics, and commitments of its emplaced geopolitical actors and stakeholders. Ultimately, to situate energy is to reckon with interlocking positions of critique, power, and implication—there is no outside observation of energy.
Located in a national borderlands between lignite mines, Soviet-era uranium extraction, and lithium prospecting, Dresden is a palimpsest of energy cultures, uniquely triangulating nuclear pasts, fossil presents, and solar futures. A burgeoning silicon economy, political mobilizations for and against ‘green’ energy, post-socialist transformation (fatigue), and minority Sorbian agency all texture the site of Petrocultures 2026—affectively, geologically, socio-technically, historically, and politically. This brings to the fore myriad ways of situating energy, which we hope to see compounded, extended, troubled, contested, and put into relation.
The conference will feature contributions that seek to situate energy from any discipline or field within the humanities and social sciences, including sociology, literary and cultural studies, media studies, political science, history, philosophy, anthropology, design, art history, and geography.
Two optional field trips are being planned for August 25th, the day before the conference begins:
- The first will trace the enduring legacy and remnants of Soviet uranium mining in Eastern Germany. How does the region’s nuclear heritage shape contemporary life and inform visions of a sustainable future?
- The second will situate energy in its chemical-industrial environments, inviting participants to selected companies in the region and featuring a speculative design workshop in the chemical park Bitterfeld. Organizers: Alexander Klose (European Just Transition Center, Martin Luther-Universität Halle) & Benjamin Steininger (UniSysCat Cluster of Excellence TU Berlin; Max-Planck-Institute of Geoanthropology, Jena)
TU Dresden Organizing Team:
Moritz Ingwersen & Anja Lind, with Michaela Büsse, Orit Halpern, Susann Wagenknecht, and Özgün Eylül İşcen. A collaboration of the Chairs of North American Literature & Future Studies, Digital Cultures, Microsociology & Techno-Social Interaction, and the Schaufler Lab@TU Dresden.
The CFP deadline has passed, and conference registration will open in May 2026. For more information, head to the dedicated conference website: https://tu-dresden.de/gsw/slk/anglistik_amerikanistik/na-literatur/petrocultures2026.