The search for a sustainable civilization—an essential concomitant of dealing with global warming—will be driven, in part, by the “normalization” of a low-carbon lifestyle. To date, most research and discussion of this transition have centered on technological fixes and their psychological equivalent, “getting prices right.” Although both approaches seem to point to reduced levels of consumption as a result of more “efficient” processes and practices, neither really addresses the material and cognitive changes associated with the “low-throughput” economy (along the lines of what Herman Daly called the “steady-state economy) that is likely to follow from the current economic downturn and the need for drastic reductions in carbon-burning. More specifically, there is a glaring contradiction between the impetus for high rates of economic growth and the major modifications of “lifestyle” necessitated by environmental crisis.

“Lifestyle” is usually approached as an individual attribute: each of us has preferences, linked to basic needs and “expressive functions,” which we seek to fulfill through “choices in the market.” This disregards both the societal and regulative aspects of lifestyle, the first conditioned by subjectivities shaped through socialization from an early age into class, nation, ethnicity, identity, and other groups, the second by the governmentalization of consumption through advertising and other forms of preference-shaping, which serve to link lifestyle to “identities.” In other words, if “we are what we consume,” it is the regulation of “who we are” that will determine not only “what we consume” but also “whether we survive.”

Antiracist mid-twentieth century civil rights movements drastically diminished broad-based support for racist ideologies (and corresponding racial domination), yet the US is still plagued by massive racial inequalities. How do we explain this? This dissertation provides us some answers to the question of why racial inequalities persist despite widespread repudiation of racism and white supremacy. Understanding factors accounting for the existence of these inequalities and their severe consequences, which the racially disparate impact of COVID-19 has laid fully bare, is crucial for addressing the problem of racial injustice and inequality; it could also help us grasp the potential positions we might take in response to this grave problem. This dissertation furthers our understanding of racial injustice and inequality by exploring, analyzing, and discussing the politics of justice and racial politics, focusing particularly on the political-economic impact(s) of racist ideologies and responses to them, with an aim of illuminating possible paths forward in pursuit of justice and equality. This undertaking ultimately demonstrates that (in)justice and (in)equality are heavily grounded in and shaped by predominant overlapping epistemic and discursive formations in the politics of justice and racial politics (or what I refer to as the politics race and justice) throughout US history.

I argue that understanding predominant ideas in what I identify as power-knowledge-discourse nexuses in the politics of race and justice is crucial to grasping (and responding to) the ways epistemic and discursive formations historically and contemporarily inform and shape structures, systems, institutions, policies, practices, socio-political arrangements, and material conditions in the US. I examine these predominant ideas through discourse and textual analysis that engages justice theorists’ articulations of justice, critical race scholarship, and ideas and praxis aiming to alter the food system. In doing so, this study also explores varied sites, tactics, and power relations in the politics of race and justice. Utilizing these methods to explore and examine discourse, knowledge production, and praxis engaging race and justice, I illustrate how temporally contingent power-knowledge-discourse nexuses in the politics of race and justice produce hegemonic episteme(s) that shape ideas about and imaginative possibilities for justice and equality.

Beginning from theories of psychological trauma as ‘moral injury’, this dissertation argues against established models that explain posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) among war veterans as the inevitable result of exposure to violence. Instead, I argue the condition we recognize as trauma is the behavioral adaptation, following a crisis of belief, to life in anomic circumstances. Trauma’s cause is the inability of pre-existing moral beliefs to provide for the contextualization or justification of personal actions or the actions of others, resulting in the unsuccessful accommodation of morally challenging experiences. The resulting incoherence demands an interpretation of the situation as having been traumatic. Analyzing trauma requires an institutional approach that accounts for the history of the traumatic event within the broader context that gives the event meaning.

My analysis begins with veterans’ accounts of wartime experience published as war novels. Close readings illustrate the genre’s critique of the institutions of war, including the persistent suggestion that trauma results when the moral authority of these institutions proves illusory. The dissertation then considers the US Army’s institutional values to locate potential points of moral failure that may be the source of trauma among recent veterans. This analysis of the ideal soldier’s moral expectations accounts for: processes by which the Army regulates individual behavior; institutionally sanctioned limits on moral decisionmaking; the influence of historical legacies on present practices; and the relative power and motives of various political interests in pursuing institutional change or continuity. I argue American soldiers sent to war in Iraq could not rely on their available moral beliefs for two primary reasons. First, there is a fundamental conflict between the moral demands of warfighting and the cultural values of democratic society. Second, the Army creates the conditions under which its soldiers are unable to reconcile the actions it demands of them and the ethos it provides. The idealist expectations of too many American soldiers sent to war in Iraq simply collapsed in the cognitive dissonance of confronting a war they were neither ideologically nor institutionally prepared to fight.

Power lines sparking wildfires, destroying homes, and shutting down power across Northern California have generated public fury against Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E). This bankrupt utility’s grid needs substantial investment and upgrades to be made safe. Yet, the death knell for monopoly utilities may have already sounded; California’s energy transition is underway, and new energy providers and models challenge the incumbent utility’s monopoly control. Political struggles amidst legislators, utilities, new energy providers, and communities have emerged, and will be at the core of energy transitions in California and elsewhere.

To understand the social and political ramifications of future electricity systems, this dissertation explores how energy has been and will be provided and governed. Making the case that electricity is ‘political’, a historical narrative follows a series of concerted political decisions on technology and infrastructure that, over a century ago, created a centralized electricity grid under regulated monopoly utilities. This model is gradually disrupted by decentralized energy resources such as solar rooftop, electric vehicles, charging stations, batteries and microgrids. New technologies see new institutional and governing arrangements, from city-, municipal-, cooperative- to individual control. As blackouts make it clear that energy is a commodity fundamental to our modern livelihoods, climate change and pollution concerns increasingly lead to the consideration of clean affordable energy access as a right. Communities, such as in the case below, increasingly mobilize for this right.

Since its beginning in the 1990s, the Community Choice movement has explored alternative imaginaries of utilizing decentralized energy technology for local self-sufficiency and sustainability. CCAs are a model for local power regulated by local not-for-profit entities acting in their communities’ best interest. CCAs began as a bottom-up and grassroots initiative, transforming into an urban governance movement as the size and number of the organizations grow. The first CCA in California emerged in Marin County in 2010, and today 19 CCAs provide electricity to 10 million state residents. The development of CCAs depicts the politics of energy transitions; competing visions of clean energy models by new energy providers are met with resistance by the incumbent utility and government regulatory agencies. My cases display how imaginaries of more sustainable futures clash in political realms, producing new ecologies of power.

With a bankrupt utility, still nascent CCAs, and the intermittent nature of renewable energy, the state finds itself at crossroads. Through personal interviews with regulators, policymakers, energy companies, activists and local communities, I explore these imaginations and the social and political implications of various energy and governance configurations.

Developments in California have implications elsewhere. Changes in energy provision are intertwined with social and ecological futures, justice and democracy around the world. The concluding chapter, drawing from personal research across both the developed and developing world, puts these elements into dialogue with each other.

Name: Claire Lyness

Title: Governing Bodies: Gender and the Politics of Corporeal Weaponization

This dissertation engages with women’s participation in three practices of political violence – suicide bombing, dirty protest and hunger striking. These practices all entail the weaponization of the body in distinct ways and are often placed beyond the scope of acceptable forms of violence. They are associated with “terrorist” subjects and are deployed against the state. I argue that the transgressive quality of these modes of corporeal weaponization is further amplified when the perpetrators are women. Following feminist scholarship on gender and political violence, I attend to the question of agency and consider how it is precisely the erasure of feminine bodies from the space of political violence which may conversely constitute a unique form of political agency.

Female suicide bombers, for example, are often cast as particularly lethal weapons because of their capacity to use feminine embodiment (usually feigning pregnancy) as a disguise. In such representations, women’s bodies carry with them the significations of the private sphere – domesticity, nurture and care – and therefore are not read as violent actors. The association of femininity with the private sphere is what constitutes the deadly “undetectability” of the female suicide bomber. In the first chapter of this dissertation, I argue that the terrorism studies literature that engages with the figure of the suicide terrorist attempts to recapture suicide terrorism as a rational phenomenon with an identifiable strategic logic so that the suicide bomber may be effectively governed. At the same time, however, these literatures produce the female suicide bomber as a singularly risky subject who, because of her feminine embodiment, frequently exceeds attempts to govern her.

In the second chapter I shift to a different comparative site – the period of conflict in Northern Ireland known as the “Troubles.” I argue that this formation can be read alongside the contemporary War on Terror, as many of the techniques and modes of counterterrorist governmentality recur across these two sites. I look at the dirty protest in Armagh prison undertaken by thirty Republican prisoners in 1980. I examine the conditions of historical absence that have constituted the women’s protest as marginal to the men’s protest at the Maze prison, which has since featured heavily in Republican commemorative tropes. I argue that attempts to understand the protest as reclaiming or “seizing control” of the women prisoners’ bodies from the disciplinary regime of the prison often unintentionally reiterate a vision of the subject that is guaranteed by a mind/body dualism. Here the body is read as a passive, inert materiality that is animated only by the lively, willful mind. The problem with such accounts is not only that this dualism has functioned to historically exclude certain groups – including feminized and racialized subjects – from political life, but that it cannot account for certain modes of agency in which the body exerts a force of its own kind.

Finally I engage with the cases of Marian and Dolours Price, two IRA prisoners who went on hunger strike (and were force-fed) in HMP Brixton in 1974. The sisters’ were eventually released in 1980 and 1981 reportedly suffering from anorexia. Finding the co-signification of women hunger strikers with anorexia or eating disorders to be a common one, I consider the feminist literature on anorexia and argue that the case of the Price sisters’ disrupts the distinct boundary between pathology and protest. I argue that this has consequences for our understanding of political agency in hunger striking more generally and provokes further consideration of the agency of the body in such practices of resistance.