Energy Humanities and Petro-culture Studies

Energy Humanities and Petro-culture Studies constitute an interdisciplinary endeavour that brings humanistic inquiry to bear on the production, circulation and cultural significance of fossil fuels. Drawing on history, literature, media studies, anthropology and geography, scholars in this field examine how oil and its infrastructures shape social relations, political imaginaries and planetary ecologies. Key concerns include the narratives that sustain petro-hegemony, the labour and lived experience of extractive communities, the environmental injustices of sacrifice zones, and the aesthetic strategies that rehearse or contest the promise of endless growth. By attending to artefacts ranging from documentary film and theatre to poetry and television hardware, practitioners reveal the deep entanglements between energy regimes and colonial as well as neocolonial formations. In doing so, they illuminate pathways to solidarity between diverse stakeholders and chart decolonial, ecocentric alternatives to a world predicated on hydrocarbon dependency. The field’s global perspective underscores the uneven burdens of climate crisis while also proposing creative methods—participatory arts, narrative interventions and media archaeology—to reconnect fractured publics and foster more equitable energy futures.

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Energy Humanities and Petro-culture Studies publication trend

The graph below shows the total number of articles in energy humanities and petro-culture studies across all publications each year (not limited to Nature Index journals).

Technical terms

Energy Humanities: An interdisciplinary domain that applies humanistic methods to the study of energy systems, examining cultural, social and historical dimensions of energy production and consumption.

Petro-culture: The network of practices, symbols and narratives through which societies normalise and sustain dependence on petroleum and its derivatives.

Petrocene: A proposed epoch defined by the dominance of fossil-fuel infrastructures in shaping environmental change, social organisation and cultural imaginaries.

Alienation (social theory): A condition in which individuals feel estranged from the products of their labour, social groups or wider political movements, often used to analyse oil-industry workforces’ disconnection from climate activism.

References

1. The rise and fall of the Synthetic: The mediatization of Canada's oil sands. International Journal of Cultural Studies (2023).
2. Reading oil (back) into media history: The case of postwar television. International Journal of Cultural Studies (2022).