The FluxKit for Energy Transition was created as a part of Speculative Energy futures, under the banner of Just Powers–a research project on decolonial and intersectional climate justice & energy transition, that brings together scholarly inquiry, arts-based and creative process, and Indigenous spirit and ceremony, to explore diverse perspectives on the topic of just energy transition and climate justice. Together, this team has shared knowledge across disciplines, generations, across time and space via Zoom during a global pandemic, and across cultural worldviews. It is an intergenerational, intersectional, interdisciplinary, intercultural project that aims to imagine just (energy and climate) futures that go beyond what is currently accepted as possible.
This project was coordinated out of Treaty Six and Métis Region 4, but under the global pandemic became a project created in the local spaces and in conversation with the local knowledges and lands where participants resided across Turtle Island from the unceeded Coast Salish lands on the West Coast to the lands of the Mi’kmaq, the Innu and the Inuit on the East Coast.
The FluxKit is collaborative in terms of the thinking and making that went into its creation, and it also demands a collaborative unpacking and engagement with the ideas and activities in the kit–so that its communities of encounter can explore what it means to think through locally situated responses to the energy transition and social transitions underway as a response to the climate crisis. Whose transition is underway? Is there a place for you and your community in this transition? If not, what transition do you want? Is it hard to imagine? Hopefully, working with the prompts and activities in the kit, you will come up with socially just climate responses attuned to the human and more-than-human needs of your community. Ideas that, whether they work or not in your community, might work elsewhere if shared, or be networked and coordinated: locally situated responses that are globally networked. This is one of many ways to create a global climate strategy that is–not a one-size fits all set of mandates–but a collection of locally situated and locally generated responses that work in concert. Whether you believe it is possible to still save human and more-than-human species at risk in this crisis, or not, the potential of this type of response is that, at the very least, it can create community conditions of greater care that will make us more resilient and life more livable as we ongoingly respond to a planet in flux.
In November 2022, the Speculative Energy Futures team showcased and animated the FluxKit for Energy Transition in St. Gallen, Switzerland as the first visiting artists-in-residence at SQUARE – the University of St. Gallen’s interdisciplinary space dedicated to fostering dialogue between science, society, business, politics, and culture. During the two-week residency Dr. Wilson was a Visiting Professor in The School of Humanities and Social Sciences, teaching a block course related to their Special Topics in Energy series.
