Boamah’s (2025) focus on the epistemic cultures of energy justice is certainly highly apt and timely. Recent years have seen a dramatic expansion of scholarship on the variegated – and constantly expanding – inequities related to the recovery, transport and consumption of energy resources. This body of work has extended beyond the traditional tenets of energy justice (Fuller and Bouzarovski, 2023; Jenkins et al., 2021) to engage with a broad range of disciplinary and geographical contexts. Boamah’s call for prioritizing ‘knowledge derived from comparative case studies and comparative epistemologies of justice’ (17), therefore, reflects a clear and present need in both research and practice.
Human geography can provide a useful starting point for developing an integrated and transparent engagement with the knowledge architectures and power relations that drive energy inequalities. Rather than speaking about energy ‘justice’, a number of human geographers – as well as social environmental scientists, legal scholars, energy economists and other social scientists – have shifted the focus onto the nature and experience of ‘injustice’, namely the impacts of structural violence on particular groups and places (Bouzarovski and Robinson, 2022; Mulvaney, 2024). While the distinction between injustice and justice has rarely been explicitly conceptualized within the energy domain, some of the broader literature has tended to critique the normative assumptions of the justice frameworks, while highlighting the manifestly tangible nature of the injustice itself (Fincher and Iveson, 2012).
If we are to act upon Boamah’s (2025) contention that the ‘justness of spatial or geographical processes in energy transitions is constituted by and constitutive of disciplinary commitments, ideological orientations, and epistemological position(s)’ (17), it becomes necessary to recognize that ‘injustice is not primarily the negation, failure or absence of justice’ (Heinze, 2012: 2), but rather ‘the constant product of regimes and norms of justice’ (Heinze, 2012). In other words, the social, political and economic processes that produce energy-related injustices are an integral part of energy justice conceptualizations and approaches.
Still, the specificities of energy injustice are comparatively understudied, in both empirical and conceptual terms. One consequence of this situation has been the long-standing invisibility of infrastructural labour (Van Lanen, 2025) in efforts to resist and confront energy injustice. While much attention is given to the political and material aspects of energy justice, the many functions of human labour and work – as inherent components of injustice, and key underpinnings of resistance and struggle – are frequently overlooked. However, injustices affect all forms of labour associated with the (re)production, maintenance and contestation of energy flows in society (Bouzarovski, 2022a). Understanding how different forms of labour intersect with energy injustices is essential for the articulation of an inclusive, integrated and engaged understanding of energy justice itself.
