HUMSS - Petra Dolata

Toward a Micro-History of Energy Transitions: Women in the Ruhr Region, 1950-80

This presentation will discuss the role of individual agency and everyday experiences in past energy transitions. Using the example of the single fuel transition from coal to oil in mid-20th century West Germany, it asks how coal miners’ wives in the Ruhr region simultaneously resisted and became agents of change in a specific socio-material and cultural energy system. It examines individual personal lives as complex practices and narratives of producing and consuming energy. It will be argued that reinterpreting structural change (Strukturwandel) in the region as energy transition allows us to broaden histories of (paid) labour and deindustrialization to include women and to write a more comprehensive energy history that integrates energy production and consumption.