S10E04: Cara Daggett Unpacks Petro-Masculinity 

This episode explores Cara Dagget­t’s con­cept of petro-mas­culin­i­ty. It explains how fos­sil fuel-based pow­er struc­tures depend on a gen­dered and racial order­ing of the world. How do the threats of cli­mate crises feed into reac­tionary pol­i­tics? Lis­ten to hear why it is crit­i­cal to con­sid­er demo­c­ra­t­ic soci­ety in a glob­al eco­log­i­cal con­text, one that inte­grates the nat­ur­al and social aspects of cli­mate and politics.

Guest fea­tured on this episode:

Cara Newt Daggett, Asso­ciate Pro­fes­sor in the Depart­ment of Polit­i­cal Sci­ence at Vir­ginia Tech and cur­rent­ly a Senior Fel­low at the Research Insti­tute for Sus­tain­abil­i­ty at the Helmholtz Cen­ter in Pots­dam, Ger­many.
Her research address­es the pol­i­tics of ener­gy and the envi­ron­ment. It draws on a rich tra­di­tion of rad­i­cal fem­i­nist and eco-fem­i­nist work to illu­mi­nate key con­tra­dic­tions at the heart of cli­mate crises today. Her first book titled “The Birth of Ener­gy, Fos­sil Fuels, Ther­mo­dy­nam­ics, and the Pol­i­tics of Work” received the Clay Mor­gan Award for Best Book in Envi­ron­men­tal Polit­i­cal The­o­ry. It traces the geneal­o­gy of our dom­i­nant con­cep­tion of ener­gy back to the 19th cen­tu­ry and makes a strong argu­ment for trans­form­ing the pol­i­tics of work as a pre­con­di­tion for over­com­ing the his­tor­i­cal impasse of the ener­gy prob­lem in the Anthro­pocene. She has fur­ther pub­lished wide­ly on issues of ener­gy jus­tice, ener­gy and dom­i­na­tion and fem­i­nist ener­gy systems.