New collection of CESET poems published

CESET researcher Dr Hita Unnikrshnan has published a series of poems entitled "The Powers That Be..." in a new open access book - Intersectional Climate Justice in Eastern Africa - published by Bloomsbury. 

In the poem Hita attempts to bring to life the intersectional narratives and experiences of the team researching CESET. Through the five verses of this poem, she first describes the struggles of people working to sustain an Ethiopian hydroelectric power plant in the face of the Tigray War.

She then recalls stories narrated to the team during a visit to a community energy plant and its beneficiaries in Mozambique as part of the annual CESET meeting, where Mozambican nurses recounted their stories of how they had to bring newborns into this world under candlelight before the advent of community energy systems into their neighbourhoods.

In the next Hita describes how, despite the deep and intersectional inequalities within urban energy landscapes (Castán Broto 2019), some of the interviews they conducted with energy companies and utilities as part of CESET show the reproduction and perpetuation of various binaries of our times; most notably that of gender.

Following this, she crafts a narrative demonstrating the importance of intersectional thinking, particularly in terms of unpacking power imbalances inherent to operationalizing the prevalent and hegemonic discourses that draw on various binaries.

Finally, in the last verse of the poem, she captures the thinking behind an initiative called the ‘Gender Equality 103and Social Inclusion Seal’ (GESIS), a collective endeavour between Mozambican civil society, energy utilities, academics and members of the CESET team. GESIS is structured as a regulatory reform that encourages small energy operators to be accountable for gender equality and social inclusion both within their own organizations and the communities they serve, thereby reaping structured and systematic benefits. 

Access the book