This collaborative research examines siting, permitting, and other procedural aspects of utility-scale solar rollouts from the perspective of residents at the point of production. Using critical agrarian studies frameworks bringing extraction and energy into the same frame as land tenure and agrarian change, this seminar documents how residents come to know of megaprojects in two disparate contexts: Appalachian US and southeastern Morocco.

We ask how are siting, permitting processes, and impact analyses designed to either facilitate or foreclose community engagement in large scale solar (LSS)? This research takes a place-based approach to detailing how continuities with bureaucratic regimes associated with mining, competing temporal and spatial registers, and the encounter between global capital flows and local political dynamics all produce an indeterminate political field, a field that perpetuates the inequalities of fossil fuel capitalism but might also create openings for expressing agency.