Climate anthropologist Cymene Howe
Cultures of Energy Podcast
Center for Energy & Environmental Research at Rice University
The Cultures of Energy podcast, which I co-hosted for four years, brings writers, artists and scholars together to talk, think and feel their way into the Anthropocene. In the podcast we cover serious issues like climate change, species extinction and energy transition. But we also try to confront seemingly insurmountable problems with a little insight, creativity and joy.
​All the episodes can also be found on the website:
WITH Anna Tsing
We celebrate Anna Tsing, Professor of Anthropology at the University of California Santa Cruz, one of the world’s greatest analysts of globalization and the environment and the author (most recently) of The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. Then (6:16) Cymene and Anna talk about feminist legacies, more-than-human anthropology, capitalist ruins and how to think with weeds and mushrooms.
WITH Amitav Ghosh
Cymene and Dominic define (finally!) professionalism and offer a brief review of Leonardo DiCaprio’s soon to be released climate change documentary, Before the Flood. Then (11:43) we are very pleased to welcome to the podcast acclaimed novelist, Amitav Ghosh, author of The Shadow Lines (1988), The Hungry Tide (2004) and The Ibis trilogy (2008-2015), among many other works.
WITH Timothy Mitchell
Cymene and Dominic take a break from the political chaos and happily nostalgize the 1970s. Then (13:57) to help us better understand what kind of carbon autocracy/ democracy we’re living in these days, we welcome to podcast political theorist, historian and zen master of all things carbon, Timothy Mitchell from Columbia University.
WITH Dipesh Chakrabarty
After the usual nonsense, we welcome to the podcast this week (5:11) Dipesh Chakrabarty, theorist and historian extraordinaire from the University of Chicago. Dipesh recounts an amusing encounter from his visit to Rice that helps prove that the 1950s dream of limitless plenitude is still very much alive (and not only in Houston).