Solar-Powered Community Art Workshops for Energy Justice: New Directions for the Public Humanities

As the energy and environmental humanities stress, the low-carbon transition will require cultural change as well as technological solutions. Yet, in assessing ideas and directions to this end, humanistic scholars often exclusively consider the works of professional artists and writers, ignoring a deeper consideration of how laypeople reason through renewable energy technologies and energy poetics. This article provides an alternative approach, mobilizing community art workshops as a method to explore how diverse publics experience and think with solar photovoltaic (PV) energy in two small Canadian cities: Peterborough and Corner Brook. Integrating arts-based practices with qualitative social science methods and humanistic formal analysis, we assess how participants’ experiential learning and aesthetic experiments with solar power express and inform their opinions about energy transition. Our findings show that place-based and affective forms of reasoning are evident in participants’ solar art practices, emphasizing the importance of play, place, problem-solving, and participation for climate action. We further offer this format as a way to do public environmental humanities work that blurs the distinction among research, service, and teaching, while avoiding prescriptive or hierarchical approaches to cultural dissemination or energy transitions.