Performing energy citizenship: integrating LARP and blended reflection in teaching decentralized energy geographies

This paper explores the potential of experiential learning for teaching energy geographies. To this end, it examines the use of Live Action Role-Playing (LARP), integrated with blended reflective activities, as a pedagogical approach for engaging students with the complexity of contemporary energy transitions. The case presented focuses on Renewable Energy Communities (RECs), explored through a LARP designed to engage participants with the territorial, infrastructural, and political dimensions of decentralized energy systems. Drawing on scholarship that conceptualizes LARP as a transformative pedagogical tool, the immersive phase enables students to engage with the tensions and conflicts of energy governance, multiscalar decision-making, and contested understandings of energy justice. Participants embody different stakeholders, including citizens, cooperatives, local institutions, and private actors, who are required to deliberate over questions of governance and energy infrastructures. The blended follow-up phase, including collective debriefing, provides the critical distance necessary to transform embodied experience into conceptual understanding and methodological competence. Findings highlight both opportunities and tensions: while LARP fosters empathy, agency, and engagement with decentralized energy systems, it may also reproduce idealized scenarios or uneven learning outcomes when insufficiently scaffolded. The study argues that embodied and blended pedagogies can render the relational, political, and infrastructural dimensions of energy transitions experientially visible and open to critical discussion, thereby offering a pedagogical contribution to the teaching of contemporary energy geographies.