ARC451H1
Instructor: Aleksandr Bierig
Meeting Section: L0102
Winter 2025

In an essay on the implications of climate change for human history, historian Dipesh Chakrabarty attempted to describe the elusive links between fossil fuel use and social form through a central metaphor. “The mansion of modern freedoms,” he wrote, “stands on an ever-expanding base of fossil-fuel use. Most of our freedoms so far have been energy intensive.” What this architectural image meant, exactly, is not entirely clear, but this seminar will take his suggestion as a point of departure. As societies became accustomed to living with fossil fuels, what kinds of spaces did their extraordinary power produce?

This course will consider spaces made by and for fossil fuels: their extraction, their transportation, their consumption, and their waste. Our collective investigation will range from the fundamental material considerations of acquiring and distributing subterranean fuels to the broadest consequences of their use on human culture: the compression of space and time, the creation of ever-greater scales of circulation, the politics of energy abundance, and the present global ecological crisis, precipitated in large part by their use. We will aim, in other words, to follow the fuel.

After an initial introduction to concepts drawn from the science and history of energy, the course will proceed through a series of specific episodes across multiple scales, including: the adaptation of households to this unusually dirty fuel, the novel paths of extraction and transportation that the mining and distribution of coal necessitated, and the translation of fossil-fueled geographies into the ever-larger territories and scales of nineteenth-century imperial and capitalist expansion. We will also consider the relationship between energy and culture, examining how fossil fuel created not only new spaces, but also generated novel mythologies about the purpose and direction of social and political history. The motivating hypothesis of this course is that the energetic logic of fossil fuels—their dense and concentrated power—produced a corresponding spatial logic, generating unfamiliar routes of power while also intensifying uneven geographies of consumption and destruction. In parallel to course discussions, students will work towards independent research projects on particular cases that elaborate, expand, or question the category of fossil space.