Carbon Technocracy: Energy Regimes in Modern East Asia

The coal-mining town of Fushun in China’s Northeast is home to a monstrous open pit, once the largest in East Asia. Early in the twentieth century, Japanese technocrats started excavating this cavity with the goal of accessing the purportedly “inexhaustible” carbon resources that lay underfoot. Today, amid our unfolding climate crisis, it stands as a wondrous and terrifying monument to fantasies of a fossil-fueled future and the technologies mobilized to turn those developmentalist dreams into reality. In this talk, I will present an overview of my new bookCarbon Technocracy: Energy Regimes in Modern East Asia (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2022).

MIT Campus, E51- 095

 (Click here to register for Tim Tickets if non-MIT*)

AND

On Zoom (Click here to register in advance)