Red Emma’s

Electric Life traces the intertwined history of Atlanta’s racialized uneven development and growing electricity use to show how electricity infrastructure shapes everyday life. Nikki Luke looks at how quotidian relationships with the electric utility catalyze intersectional organizing for energy democracy. She also investigates the legal and material construction of the investor-owned utility as a regulated monopoly and the state public service commission that regulates it.

Contemporary organizing for energy democracy questions how the utility and the systems that govern it need to change to ensure energy affordability, provide remedy and reparation for enduring environmental and energy injustice, and build a just and equitable energy transition from fossil fuels. Bridging urban, environmental, and labor studies, the author demonstrates how these demands to change the utility emerge from the tradition of civil rights, labor, and environmental organizing for fair treatment from the utility, affordable energy, protection from pollution, and good jobs.

Nikki Luke is Associate Professor of Geography at the University of Tennessee. Her research investigates the effects of urban energy governance on workers and communities. She studies how uneven power relations rooted in race, gender, class, and ability shape energy policy and organizing for energy justice.

Patrick directs the Climate and Community Institute’s Research Department as well as leading research on CCI’s Global Systems and Policy work, including writing on Green Industrial Policy, the role of the Pentagon in the climate crisis, and the international political economy of biodiversity loss. Prior to joining CCI, Patrick was a Lecturer in Economic Geography at Lancaster University in the UK and holds a PhD in Geography from the University of Kentucky. He has written extensively in academic journals including Science and Nature: Ecology and Evolution, and in popular outlets including Dissent and The Nation. His work has been translated into more than a dozen languages and covered in press globally.