The Toxic Politics of ‘Dirty Coal’: Far-right Industrial Populism as Purification in Poland’s Contested Energy Transition

Speaker: Irma Kinga Allen, University College London
Series: Political Ecology Group Seminar Series
Note: Note unusual time

Once a symbol of industrial progress, modernity, and optimism, coal is increasingly characterised as backward, worthless, and morally tainted– in a word, toxic. At least, that is the logic of the green energy transition - yet this perspective is far from universally resonant or inevitable. In my PhD thesis, based on a year’s ethnographic fieldwork, I explore an under-studied dynamic: how coal's shifting symbolic meanings and physical materiality have become entangled with the rise of pro-coal, far-right industrial populism in Europe's last remaining coal heartland, Upper Silesia in Poland.

In this paper, as my thesis is in the process of being turned into a published book, I revisit and share some of my work – particularly via the lens of an empirical chapter that explores this dynamic through the perspective of local residents worried and frustrated about both toxic ‘Polish smog’ and toxic ‘Polish populism’, showing how these concerns intertwine. The chapter serves to set the ethnographic scene with regards to how the increasing naming of coal as ‘dirty’ at global and local levels by a professional class, generates new forms of class-shaming discourse and materialisations that overlay onto their complex regional histories, feeding into a long-standing anti-populist/populist frontier, a relational toxic atmosphere and ground that needs to be interrogated as a key contributing factor to current far-right industrial populist backlash in Polish coal country – and perhaps beyond.