Solar-Powered Community Art Workshops for Energy Justice: New Directions for the Public Humanities (2025)

Written by Rachel Jekanowski, Alex Nathanson, and Anne Pasek

Link to full paper will be made available once publicly accessible.

Abstract

As the energy and environmental humanities stress, the low-carbon transition will require cultural change as well as technological solutions. Yet, in assessing ideas and directions to this end, humanistic scholars often exclusively consider the works of professional artists and writers, ignoring a deeper consideration of how laypeople reason through renewable energy technologies and energy poetics. This article provides an alternative approach, mobilizing community art workshops as a method to explore how diverse publics experience and think with solar photovoltaic (PV) energy in two small Canadian cities: Peterborough and Corner Brook. Integrating arts-based practices with qualitative social science methods and humanistic formal analysis, we assess how participants’ experiential learning and aesthetic experiments with solar power express and inform their opinions about energy transition. Our findings show that place-based and affective forms of reasoning are evident in participants’ solar art practices, emphasizing the importance of play, place, problem-solving, and participation for climate action. We further offer this format as a way to do public environmental humanities work that blurs the distinction among research, service, and teaching, while avoiding prescriptive or hierarchical approaches to cultural dissemination or energy transitions.

Supplemental Resources

Each site described in the paper built a different type of project. At Corner Brook, the workshops focused on solar draw bots - little robots that make a mark on a piece of paper as the move. At Peterborough, the workshops explored integrating solar powered LEDs into drawings and sculptures. In all instances, the projects were designed to enable as much experimentation and plays as possible, while still being able to function electrically. Participants experimented with the number of solar panels and loads in a given project.

Materials and Tools

These projects will work with a range of solar panel sizes and loads.

Assembly Instructions

Connect the components as shown in the diagrams below. For a solder-free project - you can twist wires together, used conductive copper tape, or breadboards to connect components. For the LED project - if using a different size solar panel or more LEDs - you can calculate the appropriate size resistor with an online LED series resistor calculator. For best results for the draw bot project, the voltage of the solar panel and motor should be aligned. The current of the solar panel should exceed the current draw of the motor.

Participant Projects