Myles Lennon
Biographic Data
| ID | 100072 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Myles Lennon |
| GIVEN NAMES | Myles |
| FAMILY NAME | Lennon |
| SIGNATURE | LENNON M |
| AFFILIATIONS | Yale University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-1702-0580 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 15 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 173 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 15 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2015 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 6 |
Solar Pioneers
Scholars, activists, and politicians attempt to provoke urgent climate action by christening 2050 as the decisive date by which the United States must transition from fossil fuels. But I contend that calendrical teleologies do not actually motivate the everyday people, activists, and workers leading the U.S. energy transition. This article explores another temporal schema seemingly unrelated to climate: the American pioneer settling the frontier,…
The Energy Equicrat
Many theorists and pundits contend that neoliberalism is on the “decline,” citing shifts in political opinions and policies. I argue that these analyses overstate this decline by rendering neoliberalism as a circumscribed ideology that subjects knowingly embrace or repudiate. As a corrective, this article argues that we must apprehend neoliberalism not simply in terms of “political will” or the “war of ideas,” but also as a spatialized, habituate…
Driving Equity
The promises and pitfalls of electric vehicles (EVs) are well-documented. EVs can decarbonize the automotive sector and generate “green-collar” jobs, but they rely on extractive, racialized supply chains and perpetuate an inequitable paradigm of vehicular mobility. While anthropologists have not extensively explored EVs, we argue that anthropology offers essential methodological and theoretical insights for confronting this complexity. Specifical…
From reduction to regeneration
The US Inflation Reduction Act allocates billions of dollars for environmental justice (EJ) programs and initiatives. Yet the IRA's approach to EJ reproduces a reductive environmentalism rooted in the extractivist growth paradigm that the EJ movement opposes. This reductive environmentalism is centered narrowly on the numerical reduction of carbon, costs, pollutants, and economic inequality. I contend that these modes of reduction are integral to…
Improperty
The cognates proper and property have a racialized relationship: ownership rights were historically rooted in white supremacist notions of propriety. Thus, Black people's efforts to challenge these rights entail the improper: breaches of rules that render us as property and as propertyless. I ethnographically illustrate this transgression to theorize the intersection of property and the improper, or improperty: modes of ownership that paradoxical…
The Problem with “Solutions
We might quibble over what constitutes an “environmental solution,” but the term is usually understood as a straightforward way of characterizing effective responses to environmental problems. Drawing from ethnographic research on New York City’s sustainable energy industry, this article instead suggests that the discourse of environmental solutions is not as commonsensical as it seems. I argue that environmental solutionism is the rhetorical off…
Pluralizing energy justice
Justice represents not only a moral obligation but can enhance the legitimacy and acceptance of a rapid push toward global decarbonization. Innovations in technology, even those geared toward sustainability, can both reinforce and introduce new inequalities and disparities across populations, while also perpetuating environmental degradation. The concept of energy justice has emerged as a conceptual, methodological, and empirical tool to both hig…
Energy transitions in a time of intersecting precarities
Postcarbon Amnesia
Climate justice activists envision a “postcarbon” future that not only transforms energy infrastructures but also redresses the fossil fuel economy’s long-standing racial inequalities. Yet this anti-racist rebranding of the “zero emissions” telos does not tend to the racial grief that’s foundational to white supremacy. Accordingly, I ask: can we address racial oppression through a “just transition” to a “postcarbon” moment? In response, I connect…
Environmental Anthropology
Environmental anthropologists have refined, challenged, and reconfigured the conceptual divide between human culture and nonhuman nature through multidisciplinary, cross‐cultural ethnographic inquiry. Problematizing the assumption that society is fundamentally separate from the biospheric realm, scholars have called attention to the various ways in which the physical environment shapes human culture and vice versa. This entry explores environment…
Social Movements
The study of social movements has tended to focus on how collective political action on the part of marginalized groups may have systematic structural effects. At the most general level, it asks how sociopolitical change occurs. Historically these inquiries have clustered around four theoretical strands: collective behavior, resource mobilization, new social movements, and political process theory. More recently social movements literature has be…
Revisiting "the repugnant other" in the era of Trump
Anthropology has long challenged etic characterizations of the contradictory other, highlighting the logics of putatively backward subjects. Recent punditry on Donald Trump's election echoes this ethnographic imperative, calling on concerned citizens to empathetically listen to the otherized Trump Voter to resolve the alleged contradictions in his worldview. This article calls for a different ethnographic approach to elucidating this confounding …
Exploring the mundane
Decolonizing energy
Hans A. Baer and Merrill Singer
Decolonizing energy
Pluralizing energy justice
Justice represents not only a moral obligation but can enhance the legitimacy and acceptance of a rapid push toward global decarbonization. Innovations in technology, even those geared toward sustainability, can both reinforce and introduce new inequalities and disparities across populations, while also perpetuating environmental degradation. The concept of energy justice has emerged as a conceptual, methodological, and empirical tool to both hig…
Energy transitions in a time of intersecting precarities
Exploring the mundane
Postcarbon Amnesia
Climate justice activists envision a “postcarbon” future that not only transforms energy infrastructures but also redresses the fossil fuel economy’s long-standing racial inequalities. Yet this anti-racist rebranding of the “zero emissions” telos does not tend to the racial grief that’s foundational to white supremacy. Accordingly, I ask: can we address racial oppression through a “just transition” to a “postcarbon” moment? In response, I connect…
Revisiting "the repugnant other" in the era of Trump
Anthropology has long challenged etic characterizations of the contradictory other, highlighting the logics of putatively backward subjects. Recent punditry on Donald Trump's election echoes this ethnographic imperative, calling on concerned citizens to empathetically listen to the otherized Trump Voter to resolve the alleged contradictions in his worldview. This article calls for a different ethnographic approach to elucidating this confounding …
The Problem with “Solutions
We might quibble over what constitutes an “environmental solution,” but the term is usually understood as a straightforward way of characterizing effective responses to environmental problems. Drawing from ethnographic research on New York City’s sustainable energy industry, this article instead suggests that the discourse of environmental solutions is not as commonsensical as it seems. I argue that environmental solutionism is the rhetorical off…
Improperty
The cognates proper and property have a racialized relationship: ownership rights were historically rooted in white supremacist notions of propriety. Thus, Black people's efforts to challenge these rights entail the improper: breaches of rules that render us as property and as propertyless. I ethnographically illustrate this transgression to theorize the intersection of property and the improper, or improperty: modes of ownership that paradoxical…
Hans A. Baer and Merrill Singer
Exploring the mundane
Decolonizing energy
Environmental Anthropology
Environmental anthropologists have refined, challenged, and reconfigured the conceptual divide between human culture and nonhuman nature through multidisciplinary, cross‐cultural ethnographic inquiry. Problematizing the assumption that society is fundamentally separate from the biospheric realm, scholars have called attention to the various ways in which the physical environment shapes human culture and vice versa. This entry explores environment…
Social Movements
The study of social movements has tended to focus on how collective political action on the part of marginalized groups may have systematic structural effects. At the most general level, it asks how sociopolitical change occurs. Historically these inquiries have clustered around four theoretical strands: collective behavior, resource mobilization, new social movements, and political process theory. More recently social movements literature has be…
Revisiting "the repugnant other" in the era of Trump
Anthropology has long challenged etic characterizations of the contradictory other, highlighting the logics of putatively backward subjects. Recent punditry on Donald Trump's election echoes this ethnographic imperative, calling on concerned citizens to empathetically listen to the otherized Trump Voter to resolve the alleged contradictions in his worldview. This article calls for a different ethnographic approach to elucidating this confounding …
Postcarbon Amnesia
Climate justice activists envision a “postcarbon” future that not only transforms energy infrastructures but also redresses the fossil fuel economy’s long-standing racial inequalities. Yet this anti-racist rebranding of the “zero emissions” telos does not tend to the racial grief that’s foundational to white supremacy. Accordingly, I ask: can we address racial oppression through a “just transition” to a “postcarbon” moment? In response, I connect…
Energy transitions in a time of intersecting precarities
Pluralizing energy justice
Justice represents not only a moral obligation but can enhance the legitimacy and acceptance of a rapid push toward global decarbonization. Innovations in technology, even those geared toward sustainability, can both reinforce and introduce new inequalities and disparities across populations, while also perpetuating environmental degradation. The concept of energy justice has emerged as a conceptual, methodological, and empirical tool to both hig…
The Problem with “Solutions
We might quibble over what constitutes an “environmental solution,” but the term is usually understood as a straightforward way of characterizing effective responses to environmental problems. Drawing from ethnographic research on New York City’s sustainable energy industry, this article instead suggests that the discourse of environmental solutions is not as commonsensical as it seems. I argue that environmental solutionism is the rhetorical off…
The Energy Equicrat
Many theorists and pundits contend that neoliberalism is on the “decline,” citing shifts in political opinions and policies. I argue that these analyses overstate this decline by rendering neoliberalism as a circumscribed ideology that subjects knowingly embrace or repudiate. As a corrective, this article argues that we must apprehend neoliberalism not simply in terms of “political will” or the “war of ideas,” but also as a spatialized, habituate…
Driving Equity
The promises and pitfalls of electric vehicles (EVs) are well-documented. EVs can decarbonize the automotive sector and generate “green-collar” jobs, but they rely on extractive, racialized supply chains and perpetuate an inequitable paradigm of vehicular mobility. While anthropologists have not extensively explored EVs, we argue that anthropology offers essential methodological and theoretical insights for confronting this complexity. Specifical…
From reduction to regeneration
The US Inflation Reduction Act allocates billions of dollars for environmental justice (EJ) programs and initiatives. Yet the IRA's approach to EJ reproduces a reductive environmentalism rooted in the extractivist growth paradigm that the EJ movement opposes. This reductive environmentalism is centered narrowly on the numerical reduction of carbon, costs, pollutants, and economic inequality. I contend that these modes of reduction are integral to…
Improperty
The cognates proper and property have a racialized relationship: ownership rights were historically rooted in white supremacist notions of propriety. Thus, Black people's efforts to challenge these rights entail the improper: breaches of rules that render us as property and as propertyless. I ethnographically illustrate this transgression to theorize the intersection of property and the improper, or improperty: modes of ownership that paradoxical…
Solar Pioneers
Scholars, activists, and politicians attempt to provoke urgent climate action by christening 2050 as the decisive date by which the United States must transition from fossil fuels. But I contend that calendrical teleologies do not actually motivate the everyday people, activists, and workers leading the U.S. energy transition. This article explores another temporal schema seemingly unrelated to climate: the American pioneer settling the frontier,…
Sociology (12 works) · Political science (9 works) · Environmental ethics (7 works) · Law (7 works) · Law (6 works) · Anthropology (5 works) · Ethnography (5 works) · Geographies of human-animal interactions (5 works) · Philosophy (5 works) · Politics (5 works)