ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on technocentric, engineering solutions to energy challenges, towards the telling of other, perhaps ‘smaller’, but certainly more diverse energy stories. Inspired by feminist and critical race theorists, it will retain an attentiveness to the extra-sectional processes through which energy and social difference co-emerge. The kinds of experiences and encounters involved in ‘bricking it’ with students sit somewhat awkwardly with previous published research about children, young people and energy. The bricks offer frequent conversation-starters, and reminders, and points of inspiration, for forays into Birmingham’s industrial past, its energetic histories, as bricks were at once built here and were used to build the energy-intensive waterways, houses and factories that became the material manifestation of the Industrial Revolution’s insatiable appetite for fossil fuels. The children were asked to invent – through drawing, modelling, dressing up, acting – the superhero that they thought could deal with the world’s energy problems.
