Global Studies Colloquium with Tristan Partridge on Resource Sovereignties and Energy Justice

‘Energy justice’ is receiving increasing attention across the social sciences as a framework for analyzing inequalities associated with energy infrastructures in both local and global contexts. Along with spatial and geopolitical analyses, scholars and activists have called for closer attention also to the temporal aspects of injustice. To do this I examine both historical inequalities (through resource sovereignties and natural resource conflicts in Ecuador) and anticipated futures (with reference to urgency and emergent views on ‘fracking’ for oil and gas in the US and UK). I discuss the relevance of energy justice research for studying links between localized justice struggles and the continued global expansion of fracking operations.

Tristan Partridge is a social anthropologist who works on energy, community organizing, and environmental justice. He is Research Fellow at the Institute of Environmental Science and Technology (ICTA) at Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (Spain). He previously worked as a postdoctoral scholar at UCSB on the NSF-funded project, Energy, Risk and Urgency, studying ‘fracking’ in the US and UK. Through projects on energy, land and water rights, and indigenous political action, his research examines the use of natural resources and the uneven distribution of related socio-environmental impacts. He received a PhD in Social Anthropology from the University of Edinburgh (2014) and has conducted fieldwork in Ecuador, India, Scotland, and the US.