Podcast appearances and mentions of darin barney

Darin Barney is a professor in the Department of Art History and Communication Studies at McGill University. He has written some really impactful work in communication studies, and received several awards for his academic work. He is a member of the Petrocultures Research Group, the After Oil collective and Future Energy Systems at the University of Alberta, among other groups. Jesse Goldstein is an assistant professor of sociology at Virginia Commonwealth University. He is a printmaker and has been a member of numerous art collectives, including Space 1026 in Philadelphia and more recently the Occuprint Collective. His current research focuses on the political economy of green technologies. Hannah Tollefson is a media and environmental studies scholar who works on questions of ecology, economy, and infrastructure. She studies how territory is technically mediated; the work of infrastructure in shaping relationships of place and scale; and the politics of energy transition. She is working on a project with Darin about contemporary efforts to develop oil sands bitumen for non-combustion uses and to devise formats for transporting bitumen in solid phase. Her work has appeared in a number of academic journals and anthologies. This conversation is focused on the reality that there is a surprising lack of friction between the fossiil fuel and the cleantech industries. Rather than posing a threat to the domination of everyday life by fossil fuels, we're seeing the ways in which compartmentalization of climate action and the diversification of portfolios is leading to a wholesale corporate capture of the future for energy, or, we should say, for fuels. In the case of Darin and Hannah's writing, their research has taken them into the boardrooms of companies that are vying for a place in the market for solid state bitumen products. With Jesse's work, there is a focus on how greenwashing as we know it has evolved into an ideology of only valuing innovation and imagination within narrow market terms, even when the innovation in question is devoted to cracking the climate crisis. In both instances, there is, in this critique of capitalist enclosure of clean energy or emergent forms of fuel, a sense that actually those that are involved in contemporary entrepreneurialism do want to have a positive social impact. The issue is that, as Jesse argues, the narrowing of innovation under capitalism means that these sorts of entrepreneurs are more or less obligated to concentrate their energy on doing well financially, rather than doing good socially or ecologically.

While many universities are divesting from fossil fuels in response to the climate crisis, McGill University continues to invest about $40 million in oil and gas. The student activists at Divest McGill have been working hard since 2012 to change this, but McGill's Board of Governors is not budging. In this episode, we discuss why fossil fuel divestment is important for the environmental justice movement, why institutions often claim that financial investments are not a political issue, and why McGill refuses to divest. We talk to Noah Fisher, a student activist at McGill, and Dr. Darin Barney, a former faculty representative on the Board of Governors, who resigned from the board along with Dr. Derek Nystrom in 2019 when McGill's Committee to Advise on Matters of Social Responsibility (CAMSR) once again refused to divest. You can learn more about Divest McGill on their website, divestmcgill.com. Darin Barney's work can be found at darinbarneyresearch.mcgill.ca and griersonresearchgroup.ca.

This week’s episode starts with some serious reflections on cracked masculinity, misogyny, 1980s culture, and the Supreme Court. But in the spirit of demanding better worlds to come, we then (15:30) welcome Darin Barney (McGill U) and Imre Szeman (U Waterloo) to talk through how best to imagine and enact positive solar futures. We start with their planning for After Oil 2: Solarity, a conference that will take place at the Canadian Centre for Architecture (https://www.cca.qc.ca/en/) in Montreal May 23-25, 2019. Imre begins by walking us through logic behind the first edition of After Oil (http://afteroil.ca/what-is-aos/), which brought together forty people from diverse backgrounds to write a manifesto on life after petroculture. Darin then explains the concept for Solarity and how it seeks to push the speculative dimension of energy humanities farther in order to help break with the hegemony of various forms of petroknowledge. We talk about solarity as a zone of contestation, solarity as menace, solarity as emancipation from other social ills, and raise questions such as ‘what would solar theory look like?’ After hearing about their exciting plans for Solarity, we close by catching up with Imre and Darin about their own latest research projects. PS Go McGill for moving one step closer to fossil fuel divestment!

Media Democracy Day Keynote speech with Darin Barney and Angela Sterritt

McGill University professor, Darin Barney, delivers the 2007 Hart House Lecture entitled One Nation Under Google. His lecture looks at many important issues, including how we are used by technology and how technology challenges citizenship. Barney is the Canada Research Chair in Technology & Citizenship.

McGill University professor, Darin Barney, delivers the 2007 Hart House Lecture entitled One Nation Under Google. His lecture looks at many important issues, including how we are used by technology and how technology challenges citizenship. Barney is the Canada Research Chair in Technology & Citizenship.

What happens when political ideology trumps hard science? What's the government's role when it comes to science and innovation? Are Canadian citizens given the opportunity to play a role as well? These are only a few of the questions tackled when Professor of Communication Studies and CRC in Technology & Citizenship Darin Barney sits down for [...]

Darin Barney presents One Nation Under Google: Citizenship iin the Technological Republic