Energy Transitions as Lived Experience: A Transnational Study of Deindustrializing Coal Regions in Europe Since 1945
Coal played a significant role after 1945 facilitating the economic reconstruction of Western Eu-rope and fuelling the ‘economic miracle’ in Germany. It also became the energy carrier around which French-German rapprochement and European integration would be initially established. At the same time, the coal economies of Western Europe were embedded in a much larger global development, namely the interrelated emergence of high-energy societies and the sin-gle-fuel transition from coal to oil which, due to its detrimental pressures on eco and earth systems, led J.R. McNeil and Peter Engelke to label the time period since 1945 the Great Acceleration. In the wake of this energy transition, waves of mine closures in coal-producing regions in West Germany, Belgium, France, the UK and then in Poland and eastern parts of Germany led to deindustrialized landscapes and significant social, economic and political changes.
Applying a multilevel perspective and focusing on Germany, Benelux and the UK, this project will examine responses to the single-fuel transition from coal to oil after 1945 at the personal, local, regional, national and transnational levels to understand how this historical energy transition impacted (de/post)industrial identities in an increasingly integrated Europe. More importantly, this project will examine energy transition as lived experience enabling us to understand human agency during an energy transition that occurred during people’s lifetimes. Redefining Strukturwandel and deindustrialization as an energy transition during the Great Acceleration, allows us to shed more light on the stories and histo¬ries of women, non-unionized and racialized workers, all of whom are often not considered as prominent players in either the miner’s labour movement or in the politics of deindustrialization.
Biographical Note
Petra Dolata is Associate Professor and former Canada Research Chair in the History of Energy at the University of Calgary, Canada. She holds an MA degree in American Studies from Ruhr-Universität Bochum, where she also received her PhD in International Relations with a study on U.S.-German energy relations in the late 1950s and early 1960s which was published in 2006 with VS Verlag (Die deutsche Kohlenkrise im nationalen und transatlantischen Kontext). Before joining the University of Calgary in 2014, she was Assistant Professor of North American History at the Freie Universität Berlin, and Lecturer in International Politics at King’s College London, UK. She is the Scholar in Residence (2018-2023) at the interdisciplinary Calgary Institute for the Humanities, where she also co-convenes the Energy In Society research group. Her current research focuses on European and North American energy history after 1945 as well as the history and politics of energy transitions. She is the principal investigator of a five-year research project on the 1970s energy crises which is funded by the Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC). She is also one of the lead scholars on a 7-year SSHRC-funded Partnership project on Deindustrialization and the Politics of our Time (2020-2027), which is based at the Centre for Oral History and Digital Storytelling at Concordia University, Canada and brings together 36 partner organizations across six countries in Western Europe and North America to examine the historical roots and lived experience of deindustrialization as well as the political responses to it.