In this dissertation, I investigate how electricity contributes to the uneven reproduction of racialized and gendered labor relations under racial capitalism and why clean energy policy becomes central to organizing to challenge these uneven connections. I build on feminist scholarship, energy studies, and urban political ecology to illustrate how electrification transforms the temporalities of social reproduction and production. I investigate new moments of everyday life that become appropriable labor through four sites: the utility, the union, the training program, and the state. These sites offer geographically distinct perspectives into the uneven appropriation of waged and unwaged labor and illuminate diverse moments of democratic politics through which people contest the devaluation of their time. Organizers in the U.S. South working at the intersection of energy, economic, and racial justice envision an alternative politics of energy democracy built around a demand to use time and resources in a way that supports, sustains, and nourishes communities. I use policy and narrative analysis to interpret the personal experiences and place-based histories that inform electricity politics. Based on archival data collection, interviews, and participant observation around policy-making and in the regulatory proceedings before the state Public Service Commission, I consider how advocates draw on the tradition of the long civil rights movement to contest the reproduction of uneven power relations rooted in difference through electricity infrastructures in Atlanta.
