Becoming Responsible with Solar Power? Extending Feminist Imaginings of Community, Participation and Care
Abstract
Solar power has long incited feminist imaginings of socio-environmental justice and a commoning of energy, despite its associations with military technology and precarious labour. This article addresses the question of responsible collaboration with a form of power that remains indifferent to human pursuits.
It does so through a situated inquiry into a solar energy initiative in the Czech Republic considered as a technoecological phenomenon. Feminist technoecology is developed in terms of a double process of associations and dissociations - or technoecological dis/articulation - through which a collective and its milieu and ethos are constituted.
It thereby attends to the immanent tensions and exclusions in the economic, political and ecological work of solar panels in particular encounters, including relations with the land and racialised labour, that differentially produce an ethos of interest and indifference. In this light, the non-participation of local Roma in the solar installation does not signal the absence of a relation but makes responsiveness, and responsibility, towards the indifference they constitute, possible.
In a mode of speculative re-articulation, immanent frictions and potentialities are reworked to expand an ethos of caring and communing that incorporates extinguishment, non-participation and indifference.