Solarity

Solarity: After Oil School 2 took place May 23-25, 2019 at the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal. Organized by the Petrocultures Research Group and the Grierson Chair in Communication Studies, Solarity assembled seventy international scholars, students, artists, activists and practitioners for three days of intensive reflection and collaboration on the challenges and possibilities of a social transition to energy systems and communities organized around the energy of the sun. 

The school included workshops on Feminist Solarities; Imagining Indigenous Solarities; Mapping Community Renewable Energy; Revolutionary Solarities; Solarpunk; and Speculative Solarities. Solarity: after Oil School 2 has generated many diverse and wonderful works, including multimedia offerings from the Imagining Indigenous Solarities workshop, led by Maize Longboat and Waylon Wilson from the Initiative for Indigenous Futures and the Feminist Solarities Workshop, led

by Sheena Wilson and Jessie Beier for Just Powers.

There were also podcasts about Solarity on Cultures of Energy with Darin Barney, Imre Szeman, Cymene Howe and Dominic Boyer. 

In January 2021, South Atlantic Quarterly published a special issue on “Solarity” edited by Darin Barney and Imre Szeman, featuring fourteen articles by participants in Solarity: After Oil School 2. 

In 2022, Solarities: Seeking Energy Justice, a book collectively authored by over fifty members of the After Oil Collective and edited by Ayesha Vemuri and Darin Barney, was published in the Forerunners Series on University of Minnesota Press.  

In September 2022, the After Oil Collective and Grierson Research Group partnered with Concordia’s Solar Media Collective for “Solarities: Thinking with the Sun,” a street-level demonstration of a solar-powered server followed by a public discussion of Solarities: Seeking Energy Justice. 

And there is more to come!  

In 2023, participants in the Speculative Solarities workshop will publish the book Solarities: Being in the Time of the Sun edited by Cymene Howe, Amelia Moore, and Jeff Diamanti. Also in the works for the coming year, Ayesha Vemuri will discuss Solarities and energy justice on Metropolis magazine’s Deep Green Podcast.