Speaker: Professor Jesse Golstein
Abstract
This presentation explores prevailing approaches to environmental politics that are intent on “saving the planet” with “clean” technological innovations that improve upon discrete aspects of the industrial economy without ever questioning prevailing patterns of material and energetic consumption. Based on an ethnographic exploration of entrepreneurs and investors in the early stage cleantech market, Goldstein looks at ways in which market discipline is both embraced and imposed. Though entrepreneurs are thought to be at the creative vanguard of sociotechnical advance, pushing the horizons of possibility in exciting new directions, it is important to also understand just how constrained their work can actually be, and how their creativity can be both limited and shaped by the financial expectations of investors.
This narrowed sense of future possibility, or settler futurity, extends far beyond the realm of entrepreneurship, shaping many forms of mainstream environmentalism, from proponents of ecomodernism to advocates for hi-tech ecosocialism and the green new deal. This can marginalize a wide range of sociotechnical imaginaries that might otherwise play a crucial role in transforming our world away from fossil-capitalism and its colonial-extractive roots. Working through a concept of energy abolition, how might ‘we’ re-orient the horizon of sociotechnical possibility otherwise, and with this, expand our sense of what vibrant and abundant futures might entail?
About the Speaker...
Jesse Goldstein is an assistant professor of sociology at Virginia Commonwealth University. His book, Planetary Improvement: Cleantech Entrepreneurship and the Contradictions of Green Capitalism (MITP, 2018) explores the limitations of environmental politics that overly rely upon technological fixes and the ways in which environmental creativity gets disciplined through the structures of entrepreneurial innovation and venture capital investment.