Prof. Kendra Kintzi reflects on her journey into political ecology and energy infrastructure research, sharing insights on decarbonization, digital technologies, and what it takes to build more just climate futures across communities and regions.
Lina: Could you share a bit about your personal journey? What experiences or influences led you from development studies and comparative literature to researching decarbonization, digital geographies, and political ecology?
Prof. Kintzi: Growing up in southern California in the 1990s, my world was marked by profound social and environmental change – from earthquakes, wildfires, and El Niño–Southern Oscillation storms, to the rapid conversion of strawberry fields into housing tracts. As a kid, I struggled to make sense of the world as it swiftly changed around me. In college, as I began learning about political ecology and critical development theory, I began finding answers to these questions – why the flooding and fires were getting worse, and why they were experienced so unevenly from block to block, neighborhood to neighborhood. I began finding a language and framework to start pulling apart the relations of power that condition uneven exposure to environmental change and the interconnections between extractive resource and labor systems. After college, I had the opportunity to move to a town called Beit Jala in Palestine, where I worked at a community-based environmental center and helped with local olive tree reforestation, grey water recycling, environmental education, and migratory bird research. I then spent several years working all over the world on renewable energy, water, transportation, and digital infrastructure development projects.
These experiences pushed me towards the questions that drive my research today, centering dynamics of ecology, power, migration, and climate change. For example, we know that decarbonization is urgently needed to mitigate climate change, but how does energy transition shift relations of power across sites and scales? How does the build out of wind, solar, and electricity grid infrastructure change landscapes and lifeways around the world? How do different kinds of energy technologies and infrastructures generate different kinds of interactions, and different possibilities for more just and equitable climate futures? And how do processes of environmental change shape collective practices of interpretation, sense-making, and action?
Lina: Your work spans smart development, digital mobilization, and energy infrastructures, from “smart grid archipelagos” in Amman to digital networks in Myanmar. How did these research strands come together for you, and what connects them at a deeper level?
Prof. Kintzi: The throughline of my research is an obsession with infrastructure – what it is, how it works, who it works for, how it is worked upon. I love trying to figure out how stuff works, and if you have a brain like mine, energy infrastructure provides a particularly rich and endless source of fascination and discovery. Energy infrastructures are so vast, varied, intricate, and dynamic. Working in energy infrastructure development for almost a decade gave me a foundational education in the nuts and bolts of how different kinds of power generation and electricity transmission and distribution systems work. Studying decarbonization through the lens of political ecology further expanded the ways that I think about the social, cultural, and political lives of technical systems and how they change over time.
My interest in digital infrastructure grew directly out of my work in energy development, as I worked on projects around the world that tried to integrate digital technology into electricity grid management in order to address key challenges around efficiency and renewable intermittency. As I watched the digitalization of electricity systems unfold in multiple places – often in faltering and uneven ways – I became increasingly interested in the social and spatial dynamics of digital interconnection, platformization, automation, and algorithmic governance. Across all of my work, whether its electricity distribution grids, or data centers, or the cell towers that power social media networks, I try to understand how these different kinds of infrastructures came to be the way they are now and how people use and change them over time.
Lina: You’ve conducted extensive research in Southwest Asia, especially Jordan—from aeolian-pastoralism to solar thermal labor, to Islamic climate finance. What first brought you to this region, and what insights have the landscapes and communities there offered you about climate futures?
Prof. Kintzi: Living and working in Southwest Asia has profoundly shaped every aspect of my scholarship, how I think, and how I approach the world. I’ve been invested in Southwest Asia for almost eighteen years now, and my work has been rooted in Jordan for almost a decade. I initially made my way to the region because I was interested in questions of empire, climate change, and the evolving political economies of oil and solar power. Over time, my connection to the region has deepened and broadened, as has my commitment to centering knowledge and lifeways in and of the region. Many parts of Southwest Asia are at the forefront of climate change, from rising temperature extremes to critical changes in rainfall, weather, and water systems – all of which have profound implications for human and ecosystem health. And many communities across Southwest Asia have developed key practices, old and new, from architectural and building practices to collective land management and cultivation practices, that can radically reshape climate mitigation and adaptation efforts.
Lina: Your research shows how “smart” grids, solar infrastructures, and climate finance can sometimes reinforce inequalities instead of alleviating them. What approaches do you think researchers and policymakers should prioritize to ensure decarbonization processes are genuinely just?
Prof. Kintzi: Talk to people. It sounds so simple, and it is! Yet somehow this crucial component of research and development work so often gets deprioritized. I’m trained as an ethnographer, and the greatest joy of my research is getting to sit with people and hear their stories – stories about the past, thoughts about the present, hopes for the future. I also had the good fortune of working in the field of monitoring and evaluation for many years (before grad school), and it is astounding how much you can learn about what works and what doesn’t work through sustained, good-faith dialogue that actively engages a range of voices and perspectives throughout the project lifecycle. Every project is different, and every place is different, and to produce meaningful outcomes and impacts requires meaningful engagement at every level and every stage of the project development, implementation, operation, and wind-down process.
This is particularly true for contemporary decarbonization efforts. There’s a tremendous amount of large-scale solar and wind development happening around the world today, and in this moment of rapid change, we have a particular opportunity to not only reduce carbon emissions and lessen our dependence on hydrocarbons, but also to address many of the key challenges that have plagued our energy systems for decades and made them inequitable and exploitative. The first step towards creating more just power systems begins with grounded conversations, in place, to understand how we got here and how it can be different.
Lina: Your work on digital media, from Facebook mobilizations during Myanmar’s coup to the politics of smart development, reveals both empowering and destabilizing effects. How do you see digital technologies shaping environmental governance today?
Prof. Kintzi: Digital technologies are often held up as a kind of miracle cure, or panacea, for many of the tricky social and environmental challenges that have been around for a very long time. But that promise is deceptive. As powerful as some of the breakthroughs in digital infrastructure have been over the last few decades, environmental governance still depends first and foremost on social and political decision making processes.
Lina: Many of your projects highlight grassroots knowledge and community mobilization, including democratic organizing online and local resistance to uneven energy transitions. Could you share an example of a community or movement that reshaped how you think about climate politics?
Prof. Kintzi: One of my favorite examples comes from East Amman and Zarqa, in Jordan, where I had the privilege of doing research with a group of laborers and manufacturers who have built a remarkable industry for solar thermal rooftop water heaters. These small rooftop systems enable households and businesses to heat water using the power of the sun. Some of the systems use photovoltaic (PV) panels, but most of them actually use an older, simpler, cheaper, and more sustainable technology known as flat plate collectors, which are built from metal (typically copper, aluminum, and steel) and glass. These systems are incredibly durable, and the local manufacturers that I did research with had engineered ingenious ways of cleaning, repairing, and recycling the metal tubes and plates so that the systems could be used and reused for decades upon decades. Unlike PV, which is generating a lot of concerns around embodied emissions across supply chains, the environmental hazards of semiconductor production, and hazardous disposal/e-waste, flat plate collectors provide a remarkably durable, efficient, and affordable alternative. In addition to these environmental benefits, solar thermal rooftop water heaters generate critical social benefits as well. These systems were engineered in Jordan primarily by Palestinian refugees in the 1970s, and today, much of the labor of production, maintenance, and repair is carried out by Palestinian, Syrian, and Iraqi workers. The labor of building and maintaining these systems sustains vital livelihood networks while also providing an affordable source of sustainable thermal power for Jordan’s urban communities.
Lina: You’ve contributed research on gender, agricultural development, and girls’ education in East Africa. What have these collaborations taught you about bridging research with policy agendas in global development and energy transitions?
Prof. Kintzi: I’ve had the incredible good fortune of working with the Girls’ Agency Lab over the last few years to research questions around gender and agency in East Africa, and working with the co-founders Aubryn Sidle and Brend Oulo has been one of the most joyous and rewarding research collaborations I have ever experienced. A key part of what makes this work so impactful is that it is rooted in principles of community-based participatory research, where we work directly in partnership with adolescent girls and their schools and families to understand how creating supportive spaces for peer mentorship can generate transformative educational outcomes.
Lina: In your NYU MCC courses, what concepts or case studies resonate most with students when discussing smart development, energy infrastructures, or the politics of decarbonization?
Prof. Kintzi: One of the best things about teaching at NYU is getting to work with students from all over the world, who bring with them a range of perspectives and experiences. It’s amazing to watch when students find points of connection and their worlds converge. Especially when it comes to challenging topics like how new media practices are altering cultural landscapes, or how cities are changing, or the immensity of loss in our current era of mass extinction, these moments of convergence can play a pivotal role in helping us make sense of changing circumstances and find vital points of connection.
Lina: You have several recent and forthcoming works, from solar affordances to geopolitical ecologies and energy transitions. Which current or upcoming projects excite you most, and what directions do you see your research taking next?
Prof. Kintzi: Right now I’m most excited about working on my book manuscript, which takes a deep dive into the politics and social life of energy transition in Jordan. Writing a book is so different from writing journal articles, and I’m excited to get to tell stories in a completely different way.
Lina: Finally, what advice would you give to students hoping to work at the intersection of sustainability, digital technologies, and global development, especially those eager to contribute to more equitable climate futures?
Prof. Kintzi: Don’t lose hope! This is the most important thing. We can only build what we can envision, and we can only envision if we have hope. There are so many reasons to despair right now, but in the immortal words of James Baldwin, “I can’t be a pessimist because I am alive. To be a pessimist means that you’ve agreed that human life is an academic matter. So I’m forced to be an optimist. I’m forced to believe that we can survive whatever we must survive.”
