Ringvorlesung Nachhaltigkeit: Critical Perspectives on Energy Justice Scholarship

Dr. Festus Boamoah, University of Bayreuth:The fact that energy justice (EJ) itself is ?riddled' with epistemic, environmental, social, and spatial injustices or its affordances becoming dependent on ethicsoriented brandings (including emancipatory labels) suggest environmental justice dilemmas have come full circle and epistemologies of EJ notoriously fickle. Furthermore, recent emancipatory contributions to energy justice scholarship seem to embrace everything about justice conceptions and related philosophicalnormative-evaluative schema without putting everything in its context. Since the ?deprived' and ?affluent' have different commitments toward the future and good life, EJ endeavours neither guarantee uniformly desirable outcomes in non-Western settings nor can they operate deterministically across space and time. These dilemmas warrant rethinking EJ from comparative empirical, methodological, theoretical, and epistemological perspectives. I draw on African case studies to expose ?blind spots' in EJ scholarship and aspirations needing academic attention.