Our interdisciplinary PhD researcher Alison Clark recently attended a course on the Energy Humanities at the University of Stavanger in Norway.
"As we wrap up for the year in Aberdeen, I’d like to share my experience of a recent PhD course I took part of as an Interdisciplinary PhD student and affiliate of the Centre of the North. I was lucky to spend the first week of December at a PhD course hosted by the Greenhouse at the University of Stavanger on the Energy Humanities. Along with 15 other students from different universities, I attended workshops given by 7 lecturers from different disciplines who are all carrying out innovative work within the Energy Humanities.
The course was an opportunity to meet other Environmental Humanities scholars which, as an emerging field, is especially important. I met students from many different fields and disciplines, including History, Literature Studies, Cultural Studies, Public Engagement/Museology, Policy, Engineering and Social Geography. The lecturers we were taught by all had a variety of disciplinary backgrounds too, from History to Literature to Policy Studies and Social Sciences.
Throughout the week we were invited to consider what energy actually is, both in visible and invisible forms. It was informative to hear about all the different ways people interpret energy and being shown facets of life in the workshops and tours it affects which I had never considered. We visited the Oil Museum in Stavanger and were taken on a tour around a wind farm where we had the opportunity to ask the site manager questions about working in the renewables sector and the reception of local people to the building and presence of the windfarm.
I went into the course thinking of energy only in terms of fuels eg. wood, coal, gas, oil, wind, waves etc. but left with an appreciation that human energy – effort expended, food energy and food grown and of course, cultural energy are all part of the picture too.
I’m an historian, so considering the hidden aspects of larger processes is part of my work and thinking. I hadn’t thought about energy as an avenue into our usual interrogations of society and its construction. We had the opportunity to explore these ideas more fully in the workshops across the week and I still feel like I am digesting all I have learned.
My PhD considers the visual history of the field notebooks of eminent nineteenth century geologist Sir Charles Lyell. I am particularly interested in understanding how his work affected nineteenth century relationships to the environment. The course gave me a lot to think about in relation to my own work as I consider the way people think about visible and invisible energy and the ways in which that impacts their lives and choices. Through the workshops especially I have a new appreciation for the ways in which we can engage people with both the ideas and realities around energy. I look forward to incorporating the state of the art readings into my work going forward. 
I had hoped to gain a deeper understanding of the history of the oil and coal industries as the work of the subject of my PhD was tied to this. The visit to the Oil Museum helped with this a lot. I was happily let loose in the library for an afternoon, and I look forward to requesting a lot of books for our library now too!
I am almost at the end of my first year of my PhD. It was very helpful to have the opportunity to get comfortable describing my work to people who had completely different disciplinary backgrounds and some people who are working on similar questions to me but from a completely different angle. It was really rewarding to spend time with other students finding their feet in the field and getting advice from people who are now currently working within the wider Energy Humanities in different capacities.
Thank you to the Greenhouse at the University of Stavanger for hosting me and for the thought provoking week. I hope to see you all again soon.”
Alison Clark is a PhD student based in Art History, whose research into Sir Charles Lyell’s notebooks and their documentation of landscape evolution and climate change is co-supervised by Dr Isabelle Gapp.