Office for Environmental Programs - Theses
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Item(Em)Powering a Region and Shifting Coal-tures: Alternative Frameworks for a Just Energy Transition in the Latrobe Valley( 2022)What role do identity and emotion play in energy transitions? Not commonly considered in techno-economic metanarratives on energy transitions, emotional geographers and feminist scholars illuminate the need to consider the localised, socio-emotional relations of communities facing decarbonisation. Literature in this space reveals how extractive industries represent as ‘masculine, rational, economic, emotionless’ sites. Operating to conceal non-hegemonic gender identities and particular emotions as they are relegated to feminine subjectivities. In seeking out alternative frameworks beyond the existing energy paradigm for a just transition, this research poses the questions: How are identity and emotion present in news media on mining transitions in the Latrobe Valley, and what are the implications of these discursive framings for transition futures? Guided by a conceptual framework founded in critical feminist theory, this thesis contributes to the emergent field of gender and energy transitions, distinguished by the joint application of intersectional theory and a politics of emotion. I explore these questions through a thematic analysis of eighteen newspaper articles, published about the case study region of the Latrobe Valley between 2014 and 2022. This research interrogates the central and supporting identities in news media, and the material implications of these discursive framings for transition futures. The analysis further examines the emotional recollections of these subjects, conceptualising the role of affective subjectivities in (re)constructing community identity, and (re)imagining a collective post-carbon future. The findings reveal representations of identity in news media reflect normative gender stereotypes, privileging masculine identities in transition futures, whilst identities of social differences and affective recollections are supressed or omitted entirely. Contributing to the nascent body of scholarship on extractive landscapes as gendered, emotional geographies, this study presents the need for energy transitions in the Latrobe Valley to be considered as socio-material-emotional processes. Highlighting how exclusion of these tenets in news media work to shape meaning-making of transitions.