Energy, resources and their infrastructures are essential targets for reshaping societies in a time of crisis – the climate crisis the world is still facing while disaster management and media attention has turned to the Covid19 pandemic. The need to reconfigure extractivism does not become less urgent now, quite on the contrary: News of local air or water improvement – due to terminated traffic and mobility – can temporarily cover the slowdown of transitions due to emergency acts, likely recession or capacity crunch. Activists look for new ways to voice protest; they turn to the internet, banners and symbolic stand-in forms. When the Covid19 pandemic severely disrupts political participation and economic conditions, the road to post-carbon futures seems to get even longer and more winding.

The pandemic affects also the way we academics move forward. We planned several workshops and conferences in 2020 to bring together social science scholars to discuss, exchange and further develop research particularly on transition to post-carbon futures, resources, energy, infrastructures and extractivism, but had to postpone these to (hopefully) early and mid-2021. However, we are also still around and eager to continue the encounters and discussions started. To use the momentum created and the developing habitus of meeting online, we decided to organize an online discussion group in winter term.

Called the Extractivism and Transition Research Online Dialogues (ETROD), we will invite an academic every month to discuss one of her/his published paper with the group. The roughly 90 minute session will be a format to particularly render concepts more precise and to critically engage with theories related to energy consumption, resource extraction, their environmental consequences and transformation processes.