[spectre] CFP: Carbon Cultures workshop (Kassel, 4-5 Mar 27)

[Andreas Broeckmann]

From: Katrin Nahidi
Date: Oct 30, 2026
Subject: CFP: Carbon Cultures (Kassel, 4-5 Mar 27)

Kassel, University of Kassel, Mar 4–05, 2027
Deadline: Nov 30, 2026

Carbon Cultures: Practices, Visualities and Material Ecologies in the 
Fossil Age.

This workshop is organized by the Profile Area Raw Material Cultures at 
the RAW Center for Resources Across Worlds. We use carbon culture as an 
analytical category to situate modern and contemporary art and cultural 
production within the fossil resource worlds of their creation, 
circulation, and valuation. These conditions have long been treated as 
neutral background rather than as culture. This workshop takes that 
invisibility itself as its object of study. To this end, we propose 
establishing a research field called Carbon Art History, a rewriting of 
art and cultural history through the lens of carbon culture. It asks how 
fossil resources came to be perceived as a natural condition instead of 
a political project that produces legitimation, visual regimes, and 
orders of knowledge.

Carbon culture produces more than just narratives; it produces a 
material culture in the most literal sense: artworks, exhibitions, 
archives, and the apparatuses through which images and collections are 
created, transported, and preserved, and the material and epistemic 
conditions of producing art. Methodologically, the workshop builds on 
Energy Humanities, extending them specifically into art history as 
cultural history. It brings together approaches from archaeology, museum 
studies, material cultural studies, and visual culture, combining them 
with close readings of artistic and archival production.

As an emerging field, Carbon Art History cannot rely solely on Energy 
Humanities. It requires a genuinely interdisciplinary methodology that 
combines materialist approaches with postcolonial and decolonial 
material histories. Drawing on posthumanist thought, we shift attention 
from human actors to the material life of resources, artifacts, and 
images. However, we hold this shift accountable to questions of power. 
In our approach, materiality is never abstracted from the colonial and 
postcolonial histories through which specific resources, sites, and 
images became extractable, valuable, or invisible.

The workshop employs several complementary lenses. A sociopolitical and 
historical lens asks about the entanglements between extractivism, 
petromodernity, archaeology, and museum formation, and how coloniality 
persists as a structure while manifesting in different forms across 
various modes of extractivism. A material lens examines the ecological 
footprint of image production and the underlying resource dependencies 
of photography and cultural heritage. A political lens traces how oil 
economies have shaped visuality, cultural and artistic infrastructures.

Considering these different accounts, the workshop asks what it means to 
(re)write a decolonial material history of art, one that acknowledges 
the agency of things and the colonial and postcolonial conditions of 
their extraction, circulation, and preservation. How do material and 
discursive registers co-produce each other in these processes? 
Aesthetics may become complicit with fossil ways of life through these 
very material entanglements, without losing sight of the specific 
historical, geopolitical, and institutional conditions under which 
carbon cultures take shape. At the same time, the arts constitute their 
own mode of knowledge production, which can challenge and unsettle 
dominant epistemologies and has the potential to resist and dismantle 
dominant forms of fossil modernity. This tension serves as the 
workshop’s productive starting point. Thus, the workshop aims to test 
the analytical potential of carbon culture across regions, periods, and 
media, as well as to develop shared concepts and methods for Carbon Art 
History.

Guiding Questions:

•    How does carbon culture manifest itself in aesthetics, narratives, 
and worldviews across different historical and regional contexts? What 
new periodization does this reveal?
•    What visual, material, and media cultures have formed around fossil 
and carbon-based raw materials, and how have these cultures shaped 
perceptions of energy and modernity?
•    How does coloniality persist as a repeatable yet variable structure 
across different extraction regimes?
•    Which cultural blind spots, silences, and exclusions have allowed 
carbon cultures to persist unnoticed as merely infrastructural?
•    How have oil economies built, funded, and shaped cultural 
infrastructures, such as museums, biennials, and collecting institutions?

RAW Center for Resources Across Worlds

The RAW Center for Resources Across Worlds, a Käte Hamburger Kolleg 
based at the University of Kassel and funded by the German Federal 
Ministry of Research, Technology, and Space, is an interdisciplinary 
research center for advanced studies. The center is dedicated to 
interdisciplinary research on the global transformation of resource 
worlds and the profound cultural, aesthetic, political, economic, 
social, and ecological changes associated with them. Embedded in the 
University of Kassel’s strong profile in research on sustainability, 
critical arts, the humanities, and global political economy, the center 
brings together international fellows and early career scholars. It 
offers a space for collaborative, theory-driven, and empirically 
grounded research on the possibilities and conflicts of contemporary 
material and cultural transformations and energy transitions. Rather 
than treating resources as given material objects or as neutral inputs 
into economic processes, the center approaches them as part of 
historically specific “resource worlds”: configurations in which 
material properties and infrastructures intersect with institutions, 
power relations, social practices, knowledge, technologies, cultural 
meanings, and imaginaries. Bringing together perspectives from the 
humanities and social sciences, the center examines how such resource 
worlds emerge and stabilize, how they organize access, use, and 
distribution, and how they are contested and transformed. Its four 
Profile Areas – Raw Material Cultures, Raw Material Practices, Raw 
Material Regimes, and Critique/Reflection – provide integrative, 
interdisciplinary, connected, and complementary perspectives on these 
processes.

The center’s first thematic year, Carbon Culture, takes the fossil 
foundations of modern societies as its common point of departure. Coal, 
oil, and gas have not simply supplied energy to otherwise independently 
developing societies; their extraction, circulation, and use have become 
deeply embedded in infrastructures, institutions, patterns of production 
and consumption, everyday practices, forms of social reproduction, and 
cultural meanings and imaginaries. Carbon Culture therefore refers to 
the historically specific social formations through which fossil 
resources have become constitutive of modern ways of life and societal 
organization. The first thematic year asks how these fossil-based 
resource worlds emerged and became institutionalized, why they have 
proven so persistent despite mounting ecological, technological, 
political, and geopolitical pressures, and how they are currently being 
challenged, adapted, and recomposed. Rather than assuming a linear 
transition from a fossil to a post-fossil order, the center examines the 
tensions between persistence and transformation and the ways in which 
existing and emerging resource worlds become layered, recombined, 
fragmented, or replaced.

Information and requirements for participants

The workshop offers space for up to 12 participants, and the call is 
addressed to researchers at postdoctoral level and above. A publication 
is planned to follow the workshop. Prospective contributions should be 
presented and discussed during the sessions. Limited funds are available 
to support travel and accommodation. Venue: Wilhelmshöher Allee 47, 
University of Kassel, 34117 Kassel.

Application modalities

Applicants are invited to submit a 250-word abstract and a 150-word 
short bio to rohstoffwelten at uni-kassel.de by 30 November 2026 as a 
single PDF including the title, abstract, and short bio, affiliation, 
and contact details. Please use “Workshop W1-3” as the subject line of 
your email. If the abstract is accepted, a five-page paper draft will be 
required for circulation among workshop participants in advance. The 
deadline for this paper draft will be 31 January 2027.

Organizers: Prof. Dr. Liliana Gómez and Dr. Katrin Nahidi.

Reference / Quellennachweis:
CFP: Carbon Cultures (Kassel, 4-5 Mar 27). In: ArtHist.net, Oct 30, 
2026. <https://arthist.net/archive/54783>.

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