Part workshop, part film screening, part lecture, this presentation focuses on what it entails—sensorially, emotionally, politically —to live through contemporary energy transition. It addresses how the global quest for green energy manifests in Bulgaria amid changing political regimes and geopolitical affiliations. Postsocialist and newly accessed European Union countries like Bulgaria negotiate their international allegiances through debates over infrastructural interdependence and green energy development. Until recently in Bulgaria, nuclear power plants—often seen as a potentially clean energy source—depended on Soviet-built and Russian-maintained infrastructures. This presentation explores the everyday experiences of nuclearity in the context of green energy transition. It presents ongoing ethnographic fieldwork at the site of the Kozloduy Nuclear Power Plant in Northwest Bulgaria and clips from an in-process collaborative film about the never-completed Belene Nuclear Power Plant on the nearby banks of the Danube River. By analyzing these two sites of nuclear development and disappointment together, this talk invites us to think about what green energy transition means to those living near, working with, and relying upon aging infrastructures and dreams of nuclear futures.
Elana Resnick is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where she leads the Infrastructural Inequalities Research Group. She studies waste, race, labor, nuclear energy, rivers, and humor using multi-modal research methods. Her work has been published in American Anthropologist, Collaborative Anthropologies, Journal of Contemporary Archaeology, Anthropology of East Europe Review, Anthropological Journal of European Cultures and Public Culture. She received the 2022 American Anthropological Association Annual Prize for Exemplary Cross-Field Scholarship and the 2023 Women’s Forum Article Prize of the British Association for Slavonic & East European Studies. Her book is forthcoming with Stanford University Press.
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