Inwards to the centre! The trouble with ‘repositioning energy geographies’

Abstract

‘Repositioning energy geographies’ reprimands energy geographers for a moral and strategic failure to be visible, arguing this failure has condemned energy geographies to a marginal and occluded position within human geography. It is a bracing and enjoyable read with some provocative observations about scholarly practice. But the authors’ diagnosis is unconvincing, and their rallying call to reposition energy geographers ‘inwards to the centre’ is ultimately (over)powered by their choice of a clunky centre-periphery metaphor. Ptak et al.'s comments on the need for conceptual development within energy geographies express a valid concern, but they yoke this concern to spurious claims about arresting marginality and a troubling yearning for disciplinary centrality. This commentary shares Ptak et al.'s faith in the potential of energy geographies but outlines four reasons for passing up their invitation to turn ‘inwards to the centre’.

In an engaging piece written with verve and passion, Ptak et al. (2025) castigate their fellow energy geographers for being insufficiently (sub)disciplinary. The authors bemoan a moral and strategic failure (as they see it) by energy geographers to champion Energy Geographies as a subdiscipline, while also affirming the value of inclusivity and plural approaches. Their signature complaint is that energy geographies as a subdiscipline is ‘occluded’, ‘marginal’ and ‘subsumed’ – and, accordingly, its true potential remains unrealised. The only remedy for this ‘aggregate categorical evasion’ (11) of energy geography, they argue, is to reposition energy geographies ‘inward to the centre’ (14). To do this, energy geographers need to fly the flag for energy geography more often, by self-identifying as energy geographers and adopting energy geographies as a keyword in their publications.

There's a bracing confidence to this eclectic and occasionally stirring piece that manages to mix a decolonial critique of geographical knowledge production with an atavistic rallying cry (in which ‘torches are lit’, no less) to take energy geographies out of peripheral ‘darkness’ into the ‘light’ (11). The authors’ enthusiasm for ludic language is enjoyable and something to celebrate, although it proves poor protection from the perils of an over-wrought metaphor. Ultimately Ptak et al.'s analysis and vision for energy geography fall captive to their primary spatial metaphor of centre and periphery. A mythical ‘centre’ dominates their piece, simultaneously creating energy geography's assumed marginality and providing the route to overcome it. I share the authors’ conviction in the social value of geographical work on energy and their concern for the field's potential, but I am not convinced by their diagnosis of the problem or call for energy geographies to turn ‘inwards to the centre’. Here are four reasons I won’t be rallying with a lighted torch.

First, the authors present scant evidence in support of their central claim that ‘energy geographies endure an occluded existence subsumed’. To the extent Ptak et al. invoke a measure for this ‘ongoing marginality’ within human geography it is the number of manuscripts using ‘energy geographies’ as a keyword (10). Yet no data are presented, and the literature review element of their article shows a vibrant and cumulative body of work that is in conversation with other fields and with itself – the beginnings, perhaps, of the emergent literary canon they desire for energy geography. Yet despite this evident body of work the authors double down, proclaiming themselves ‘perplexed by its peripheral position’ (9) and arguing further – also without evidence – that ‘progression has stalled’ over time (9) so that energy geographies ‘remain(s) a curiously eclipsed academic field’ (10). There is a non-trivial question here about the metrics through which one might seek to gauge peripherality within a discipline and determine ‘progression’ over time, although the authors offer no clues to how they have arrived at their damming assessment. Absent specific data or contextual information in support of the authors’ opinion, other equally subjective assessments can be drawn about the significance of energy geographies. Using an only marginally better evidence base – paper and panel events at national and international geography conferences, and online activities by speciality groups like the AAG's Energy and Environment Speciality Group and RGS-IBG's Energy Geographies Research Group – one can conclude energy geographies is in fine form, a significant and highly active part of human geography.

Second, the authors argue that energy geography's peripheral position can be explained, at least in part, by the ‘absence of a concise understanding of what precisely defines the subdiscipline’ (3). The definition they offer to fill this vacuum is disciplinary and disciplining: it assigns energy geographies a sub-position under the umbrella of geography, a definition that privileges energy geography's relation to its ‘parent’ discipline rather than its functional proximity to cognate fields anchored in other disciplines (e.g. energy research in anthropology, science and technology studies, political science, or business and management). But, beyond chastising energy geographers for neglecting to pay tribute to their disciplinary parent – via the corrective assertion that energy geographies is, first and foremost, a division of geography – this definition does not do the difficult work of sub-disciplinary identity formation they claim. Indeed, the definition's methodological and theoretical scope is admirably broad and inclusive. They are certainly capacious enough to encompass a range of work on ‘relationships coupling energy and space’ over which geography has no natural monopoly and which, in practice, are undertaken within geography and beyond. Overall, the authors’ efforts to address the disciplinary vacuum are unobjectionable – except for what they claim this definition does: defining energy geographies in this way does not solve what they diagnose to be energy geographies’ (sub)disciplinary identity problem.

Third, the apparent importance of energy to a range of contemporary social challenges is not, on its own, a justification for the ‘centrality’ of energy geography. It is easy to see (and support) the strategic value of the authors’ observation about the ‘centrality of energy in human-environment interactions’ (1). A group of us mobilised a very similar argument when making the initial case for creating an Energy Geographies Working Group within the RGS-IBG around 15 years ago (which subsequently evolved into the Energy Geographies Research Group, EnGRG). Yet, energy geographers and researchers from other disciplinary traditions – like history, political science and philosophy – have increasingly shown the political work done by ‘energy’ as a (industrial, imperial) concept in constituting geographical worlds (Barak, 2020; Daggett, 2019; Smith, 1998). Much of energy's apparent centrality to the concerns of human geography, then, is a function of the radical commensuration achieved by the category ‘energy’ – its capacity (and historic functionality) of bringing all manner of heterogeneous materials, practices and places into relation. From this perspective, the ‘centrality of energy’ is an artefact, something derived from the knowledge regimes and concepts we have inherited and, therefore, something to be deconstructed and challenged rather than held up as the rationale for a sub-disciplinary ‘land claim’ to all-things energy and space. Here the decolonial politics espoused by Ptak et al. are at odds with their aspiration to plant the flag of energy geography across much of the landscape of the discipline. Or, put differently, the kind of decolonial agenda for energy geographies the authors advocate needs to be unfolded further, to unpack and potentially dissolve some of the foundational claims about energy being ‘everything, everywhere, all at once’ (1); and, in the process, to challenge (rather than uphold) claims about the necessity for energy geographies to be ‘central’ to human geography.

Fourth, there is a troubling conflation in Ptak et al. between their aspiration for energy geography to drive conceptual development and the impulse to ‘occupy a central position within emergent climate scholarship (and…) within broader disciplinary confines of human geography’ (1). I share the authors’ aspiration for energy geographies to be more than ‘largely borrowed or derivative’ (10) and have argued elsewhere for its conceptual potential beyond being a (merely) thematic field (Bridge, 2018). But calling for conceptual development within energy geographies has little to do with being ‘central’ within human geography (whatever that may mean). For those concerned about the future of energy geographies, the primary question we should be asking is not about a putative reluctance for energy geographers to self-identify, or even the centrality and influence of energy geography within human geography. Rather it is about how engagement with energy as an empirical object – and from a geographical perspective – disrupts our ideas, concepts and models of the world – whether those ideas originate in and of the discipline of geography or from further afield. In short, what difference might the ‘stuff’ of energy make to our existing (geographical, social scientific) accounts.

Pace Ptak et al., this is not a narrowly (sub)disciplinary endeavour where the metric of success is the visibility or presumed centrality of energy geographies as a field. It is, rather, a flatter, less contiguous and more rhizomatic undertaking – engaging at the edges of the discipline with cognate fields and actors, collaborating across difference and through the vast combinatory potential difference affords. We may work sometimes within the ‘vertical’ disciplinary framework of geography, and there is strategic value in being able to communicate energy geography to Geography at large. But, more often than not – in funded research, in policy engagement or in working with civil society partners – we are working in a more horizontal mode, carrying geographical ideas and techniques (sometimes smuggling them, with their disciplinary brand erased) into collaborations that have a healthy disregard for any notion of a geographical canon. When making the case for the Energy Geographies Working Group within the RGS-IBG, we explicitly rejected the idea of creating an ‘insular’ field (11) – an empire of energy geography – and, instead, aspired to an energy geographies that primarily looked outwards, engaging and ‘seeding’ existing fields within geography and beyond (Energy Geographies Working Group, 2011). In relation to climate scholarship specifically, we made the case for energy geographies being substantially more diverse than climate concerns (seeing that alleged affinity as a form of carbon reductionism) and the importance, therefore, of developing energy geographies through both its intersections with other fields and excesses beyond them. This alternative vision of energy geographies is no less ambitious or challenging than that proposed by Ptak et al., but it is different in its modalities and metrics of success. Notably it neither imagines nor craves a central position for energy geographies; and understands development not via a metaphor of growing spatial dominance – moving from periphery to centre – but through the multiple connections and spaces it opens up.

There's a refreshing brio to Ptak et al.'s paper and their willingness to exhort and reprimand their fellow energy geographers is welcome. Their explicitly disciplinary endeavour – with its yearning for the centre and talk of victories (conceded to ‘adjacent academic fields’, 11) – has a distinctive and faintly ancestral air, running counter to familiar contemporary calls for interdisciplinarity in the energy space which dissolve (rather than affirm) disciplinary identities in favour of challenge-focused research. The macro-question the authors raise – about the relation between energy geographies as an ‘object of concern’ and as a ‘field of study’ – is an enduring and vital one (2). I happen to agree with them that conceptual development should be one of energy geographies’ goals as it continues to evolve. But conceptual development does not have to be yoked to spurious claims about arresting marginality or becoming central within human geography. Moreover, energy geographies’ vision of itself should not narrowly privilege the ‘vertical’ relation to the parent discipline. It is essential, in my view, that energy geographies imagine itself in ‘horizontal’ terms (i.e. in relation to collaboration with energy-facing components of other disciplines). There is growing evidence for how research on energy landscapes and energy geographies is capable of informing and disrupting knowledge elsewhere in the social sciences and humanities (e.g. in relation to framings of energy justice and post-development, see Allan, 2024; Tornel, 2023; Tornel and Dunlap, 2025); in international political economy, see Kuzemko, 2019; Kuzemko et al., 2025; in development studies, ecological economics and communication studies, see Ahlborg, 2018; Avila-Calero, 2025; Brodie, 2025); on emotional geographies, see Hood et al., 2025).

Thus, a better measure of energy geographies’ health and success – than either keyword mentions in geography journals or publicly referring to ourselves as energy geographers more often – is recognition of the socio-spatiality of energy systems, energy transition, energy poverty and energy justice (for example) within work by non-geographers. Overall, Ptak et al. offer some provocative reflections on energy geography and its contemporary scholarly practices, but their analysis and agenda for change are overpowered by their central metaphor. Their aspirations for ‘centrality’ within climate scholarship and human geography offer a false solution for the challenges of sub-disciplinary growth and development.