Abstract
In the energy humanities and related fields, the concept of energy literacy has been used as a tool to examine people's energy knowledges, affects, and involvement in sustainable energy practices. And yet, a broader understanding of how energy is embedded in and differentially fuels and disables lives that Sheena Wilson (2018) calls deep energy literacy often remains tenuous.
Contributing to crafting 'mixed and differential literacies' (Haraway 1997) that can assist the transformation of extractive energy regimes this paper draws on conceptions of 'diasporic literacy' (Clark 1989) to examine muted energy knowledges and unacknowledged affects that transverse registers and geographies usually held apart. Here I show how working with participatory photography with people living in the vicinity of solar farms and interviews with solar micro-producers in the Czech Republic rendered unexpected memories of extractive energy ventures, displacement, and energy squandering as well as the ability to unfurl energy infrastructures and sense their future decomposition and one's bodily vulnerability.
Drawing these differential capacities together mobilises a viral model of energy literacies where 'each new attainment of literacy introduces difference into what counts as literacy' (Colebrook 2012) allowing us to sense more things, and furthering practices not of replication but of 'mapping - marking out new spaces, new dimensions, new lines of filiation' (ibid).