Energy Talk: Green Knowledge from Greece's Silicon Plains

By: Daniel M. Knight

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Synopsis: Energy Talk disrupts the claims of institutionalized categories such as sustainability, green economy, climate change, and net zero that promote a shared consensus on energy transition. These concepts often conceal the intricate details of how people engage with rapidly shifting sociotechnical environments. On the plains of Thessaly, Greece, interactions with the emerging energy landscape, particularly the expanding photovoltaic (solar) program, lead people to critique long-standing assumptions about nationalism and belonging, their experience of time and modernity, the morality of entrepreneurial opportunism, and historically grounded notions of neo-colonialism and foreign occupation.Daniel M. Knight showcases how obscured 'adelo-knowledge' is exposed during epochs of intense upheaval. Since 2009 Greece has been a hot spot of interrelated crises around which new socio-techno-natural contracts have emerged. Energy is a pivot for comprehending a decade where conventional information has been upended, traditions challenged, and assumptions fractured. Energy Talk offers an ethnographically and theoretically rich rereading of established categories usually associated with the green transition, from their local particularity to the potential implications for planetary relations.