c:o/re Fellow 01/25 – 12/25
Matthew N. Eisler is a lecturer in the Department of Humanities at the University of Strathclyde. He researches how ideology and policy inform practices of energy and materials conversion and shape social relations and environments. Matthew earned his PhD at the University of Alberta and has held fellowships at Western University, the University of California at Santa Barbara, and the Science History Institute. He also served as the Director of the Science, Technology, and Society program at North Carolina State University. Matthew has published with academic journals including Business History Review, Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences, and Technology and Culture as well as popular periodicals including Barron’s, IEEE Spectrum,and Slate. His second book (Age of Auto Electric: Environment, Energy, and the Quest for the Sustainable Car, MIT Press, 2022) traced the development of advanced-propulsion automobiles including the electric vehicle from the mid-twentieth century.
Greenwork and Environmental Knowledge
Over the last 30 years, environmental regulation has come to touch nearly every facet of life so that by the 2020s, nearly everyone, Etienne Benson has argued (2020), could be considered an environmentalist, whether willing or unwilling, in one way or another. This intriguing proposition suggests major social change, yet relatively little is known of how environmental regulations reverberate through contemporary society and construct new classes of workers, work practices, and ways of knowing environments.
This project derives its intellectual framework from longstanding efforts to reconceptualize ideas of environments and boundaries between geophysical spaces, living things, and social relations. The environmental humanities could be said to have understood work in three ways: work as a synonym for human/nonhuman agency that shapes environments; workplaces as types of environments and occupational safety and health as sets of practices co-produced around them; and relations between labor and environmental activism, explored hitherto mainly in extractive industries like logging and mining.
This project aims to expand the ambit of these investigations. It will develop a theory of work/labor in environmental context around case studies of industrial fabrication, energy conversion, transportation, systems integration, waste recovery, valorization, and disposal, and culture and lifeways.
Publications (selection)
Eisler, Matthew. 2024. From Petroleum to Power Sources: Big Oil and the Technopolitics of Energy Conversion. In History and Technology 40(3): 1-26.
Eisler, Matthew. 2024. Vehicle-to-Grid, Deregulated Regulation, and the Energy Conversion Imaginary. In Electrical Conquest: New Approaches to the History of Electrification, edited by W. Bernard Carlson and Erik M. Conway. Chum: Springer, pp 251-280.
Eisler, Matthew. 2023. Computers on Wheels? In Issues in Science and Technology 39(2), 70-73.
Eisler, Matthew. 2022. Age of Auto Electric: Environment, Energy, and the Quest for the Sustainable Car. Cambridge (MA): MIT Press.
Eisler, Matthew. 2021. Public Policy, Industrial Innovation, and the Zero-Emission Vehicle. In Business History Review 94 (4): 779-802.
