Overcoming Abstraction: Affectual States in the Efforts to Decarbonize Energy Among Young Climate Activists in Stavanger, Norway

Abstract

Sørensen engages ethnographically with energy transitions towards a low-carbon future as experienced by young climate activists in Norway’s oil-capital Stavanger. By relating the activists’ sense of climate change as abstract to climate change’s manifestation in digital data models as a phenomenon taking place in no specific location and mainly in the future (Knox. 2021. “Hacking Anthropology”. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 27.S1 (2021): 108–126), the chapter shows that the activists work to overcome abstractions by focusing on the local and contemporary through examples that come from the Global North and provide visceral, embodied effects. The young activists’ concretizing practices, Sørensen argues, result in affective states that render concreteness as something desirable and abstraction as something undesirable to be overcome, but also that in an oil-city, there is a limit to the desirability of concreteness.