Abstract
In this chapter, the problematic of energy futurity (and its education) is unfolded in relation to the troubling energetic investments through which the Industry of Education obscures and occludes the exhausting energy emergencies that characterize today’s “end times” scenario. Situated within today’s “post”-pandemic recovery deliriums, this chapter examines the (indebted) banking models and (speculative) financial instrumentalizations through which education projects its own spectacular frontiers for energetic investment, which, in turn, work to securitize the perpetuation of an education after education. By reframing today’s energy emergencies in terms of a dispersive atmosphere of anxiety and fatigue, this investigation of energetic investments in the “end times” counters the smoothing transition grammars and insufficient energy literacies that have come to exhaust pedagogical possibilities by proposing a weird pedagogy of exhaustion, or what I develop as energy mediacy. Expressed through transversal connections between education’s banking models as they are situated within the energy-climate-education nexus and some of the more mind-bending theories offered by contemporary physics in relation to the energy concept, this iteration of weird pedagogy signals the end of possibility and thus the realization of impossibility made possible when concepts no longer cohere. By negating education’s energetic speculations through negentropic experimentations, subtractive strategies and non-productive investments, this chapter asks not how to better manage educational futurity given current, and coming, energy crises, but how to un-manage it still.
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Notes
- 1.
As of May 4, 2022, the Dow Jones’ fall of nearly 3000 points on March 16, 2020 was the largest single-day drop in U.S. stock market history.
- 2.
Recent (2021) campaigns and webinars from Export Development Canada (EDC), for example, have used the slogan of “business as unusual” in order to pitch strategies for companies to “manage risk and stay the course during these challenging times.”
- 3.
The Coalition for Safer School Relaunch Across Alberta, for instance, outlined a series of urgent strategies necessary for ensuring a safe and equitable relaunch for both students and education workers across the province. Among the strategies offered by the Coalition were calls to provide adequate equipment and resources, address transportation needs, develop transparent testing and outbreak protocols, cancel standardized tests and implement variable class caps to ensure physical distancing within schools (“Coalition for Safer School Relaunch Across Alberta,” 2020).
- 4.
These were just some of the strategies outlined in a recent set of cards I received in the mail from the University of Alberta, which featured a series of “reviewed, referenced, and evidenced-based advice cards” for students to use during times of stress.
- 5.
My own involvement as an artist-researcher within the energy humanities has contributed to this speculative charge through projects such as Speculative Energy Futures (University of Alberta), which brings together artists, activists, scientists, engineers, policy makers, and social science researchers to investigate the challenges and potentials of energy transition through artistic means.
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beier, j.l. (2023). Energetic Investments in the “End Times”. In: Pedagogy at the End of the World. Palgrave Studies in Educational Futures. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-41057-4_3
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