HCIAS Wednesday Colloquium – Perspectives on Ibero America Beyond State Space. Competing Spatializations and the Violence of Energy Infrastructures

Energy infrastructures are the talk of the hour. Enormous investments are mobilized globally to overhaul national energy systems, link different grids, and make electricity provision “future proof”. Analyses, however, have frequently limited themselves to binary perspectives between national energy spaces and foreign, private provision, energy independence and dependence. Contributing to literature on infrastructure violence, energy spatialities, and contestation, Dr Jenss proposes a differentiated, relational perspective on energy spaces and their scalar iterations. Based on an analysis of three instances of infrastructural connections feeding into and out of the Mexican grid, she argues that the dominant production of spaces, rather than a rupture with previous forms of territorialisation, builds on prior (state and non-state) violence, and must be understood within the reorganisation of geographies of capitalism.