Ozzie Zehner

Hello! I am the author of Green Illusions: The Dirty Secrets of Clean Energy and the Future of Environmentalism and a visiting scholar at Northwestern University. I also write for a variety of publications, and appear from time to time in the media and on college campuses to speak about energy and environmentalism.

I attended Kettering University (BS – Engineering) and The University of Amsterdam (MS/Drs – Science and Technology Studies). I held an appointment at the University of California – Berkeley and have been a visiting scholar at University of British Columbia, Kendall College of Art and Design, San Quentin Prison University Project, and other academic institutions. See my official bio at the Green Illusions website.

The boring stuff: I primarily research the social, cultural, political and economic conditions influencing energy policy priorities and project outcomes.  My work incorporates symbolic roles that energy technologies play within political and environmental movements.  I’m also working on investigative research for projects that consider contextualized notions of power relations through expanded consideration of forgeries throughout a variety of contexts including counterfeiting operations, pornography, sex work, environmentalism, digital media distribution, cosmopolitanism, gender, and occasionally other realms. Within these themes, my theoretical work involves the sociological and psychological dimensions of denial, notions of value and economy, media representations, unintended consequences, strategic ignorance, scholarly silo effects and trained incapacity within the academy, the roles of scientific assumptions, urban myths, and what academics call “materiality.”