Abstract
While our lives are fuelled by energy, our imbrication with energy systems is notably hard to grasp. Energy flows are routinely black-boxed or expelled.
This holds particularly for the 'non-thing' of electricity largely impervious to our senses - which proffers what Bell et al (2020) call a white masculinist techno-literacy that dominates energy research and development - including participation in 'renewable' energy. At the same time, infrastructure studies have shown, that the maintenance of epistemic energetic ignorance is in fact possible only for those who can take the availability of energy for granted.
Minor literacies have developed unseen, for example in the collaborations of miners and pit-ponies that sense the dangerous cracks in coal seams - and surface as transgenerational hauntings that require new methods and sensitivities. This paper suggests that STS can learn from Caribbean feminist conceptions of diaspora literacy (Clark 1989) that are attentive to muted speech and allusion, particularly the ability to transverse registers and geographies considered apart, and to lived experiences that are only partially remembered.
Diasporic literacy insists on the necessity of reshaping even destroying dominant language. Based on ethnographic observation and participatory photography that examine solar installations in the Czech Republic, the paper gathers alternative literacies that open to electric kinship, energetic entanglements and energy justice: the unexpected re-memory of dead Romani uranium workers or displacement in the wake of the Chernobyl nuclear accident; the ability to unfurl an energy infrastructure and see its future decomposition; the ability to sense one's energetic vulnerability and entanglement with others; and the capacity to squander electricity open to other ways of relating, practicing and belonging with energy.