Papers by Kosma Lechowicz
Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, 2025
This paper examines local imaginaries of coal within the mining communities of Upper Silesia in s... more This paper examines local imaginaries of coal within the mining communities of Upper Silesia in southern Poland, offering a grounded perspective on how coal-shaped visions of a good life emerge from lived, material experiences. Drawing on the concept of bounded imaginaries, we shift focus from dominant national narratives to locally held, non-expert visions engendered by coal's material presence. Our analysis of ethnographic and historical evidence demonstrates that the material experience of coal and mining labour fosters a bounded imaginary with two interrelated dimensions: one centred on people, the other on the Earth. The people-centred dimension reveals how local visions of the good life enabled by coal are rooted in supportive and stable communities that care for their social environment. In the Earth-centred dimension, the meaning of the good life is grounded in respect for natural resources' role in sustaining human societies, an awareness of the fragility of human life, and an ethos of sufficiency. Both dimensions stem from engagement with coal's materiality, revealing visions of a good life that are not readily accessible to those without tangible experience of coal. We argue that such imaginaries hold transformative potential for shaping socially just energy transitions that are attuned to local needs and aspirations. In Upper Silesia, where coal phase-out is gaining momentum through Just Transition Funds, these bounded imaginaries can further inform emerging models of distributed renewable energy production driven by local communities. Rather than dismissing attachments to coal as relics of the past, this paper shows how the lived experiences and material entanglements of coal communities can be mobilised generatively in designing post-coal futures. By foregrounding the material roots of local imaginaries, our findings contribute to broader debates in energy social science about the importance of place-based visions, experiential knowledge, and care in driving just transitions.
Energy Research & Social Science, 2024
This paper seeks to understand how dominant high-carbon imaginaries, such as those associated wit... more This paper seeks to understand how dominant high-carbon imaginaries, such as those associated with coal, can be disassembled from within. Although resistance can have a disruptive potential to threaten the prevailing energy narrative, in certain contexts, the complete replacement of the dominant imaginary with an alternative one may not always be feasible or preferable. The paper shows how thinking about disassembly from within can be achieved by bringing the interpretative envelope of sociotechnical imaginaries (STI) into productive conversation with the concepts of hyperobject and hyposubjects. While the analytical framework of STI accounts for the material-normative co-production of future-making, the hyperobject emphasises the effects of human-natural interconnectedness, and hyposubjects elucidate how this mesh can be used generatively through attunement and subscendence. The paper illustrates this way of thinking about disassembling from within by focusing on Upper Silesia, a region in Poland uniquely bound to coal. Through the case of a local activist group Queer Silesia, the paper provides a perspective on disassembly from within where elements of the old but prevailing imaginary can be repurposed to create visions of the post-coal future without erasing the resource's legacy or compromising social cohesion.
Etnologika: Poznańskie Studia Antropologiczne , 2020
The article looks at a complex and multi-faceted character of development discourse on racehorse ... more The article looks at a complex and multi-faceted character of development discourse on racehorse breeding in Ireland, examining how the industry is packaged as sustainable, culturally significant, as well as profitable. In the first part of the article I apply the theories of notable critics of development such as James C. Scott, Arturo Escobar and Ian Scoones to show how detachment from the natural world constitutes a key component in development of modern human societies. In this part I present a brief qualitative analysis of excerpts of regional development plan for Kildare County in Ireland, and of a stallion catalogue of a renowned Irish racehorse breeder to explicate how the discourse on racehorse breeding is a bricolage of notions of connection to nature, profitability and sustainable development.
In the second part of the article I present some of the findings of my research conducted on a stud farm in Kildare County. On the basis of excerpts of three interviews, I attempt to show how young horse handlers internalise the hegemonic discourse on racehorse breeding and try to reconcile their empathy and compassion for these nonhumans with desire for a profitable career in the racehorse industry. I conclude, using Tim Ingold’s terms, that greater experience in interacting with the world and nonhumans embedded within it contributes to a further gone unlearning of one’s animality, and thus a more distanced approach to the natural world.
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Papers by Kosma Lechowicz
In the second part of the article I present some of the findings of my research conducted on a stud farm in Kildare County. On the basis of excerpts of three interviews, I attempt to show how young horse handlers internalise the hegemonic discourse on racehorse breeding and try to reconcile their empathy and compassion for these nonhumans with desire for a profitable career in the racehorse industry. I conclude, using Tim Ingold’s terms, that greater experience in interacting with the world and nonhumans embedded within it contributes to a further gone unlearning of one’s animality, and thus a more distanced approach to the natural world.