Isaac Thornley

I am a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Institute for Environment, Conservation, and Sustainability (IECS) and the Department of Human Geography. My postdoctoral research examines Canada's emerging electric vehicle (EV) battery supply chains, drawing on political ecology and energy humanities approaches. This work builds upon my doctoral research on Canadian pipeline politics (specifically, the Trans Mountain Expansion project), where I employed psychoanalytic ideology critique to analyze how state and corporate actors attempted to secure social license for the pipeline. I am broadly interested in the political and ideological dynamics of the unfolding energy transition. My teaching experience includes courses on environmental impact assessment, environmental politics and justice, environmental documentaries, and energy transitions and theories of change.

I have published recent work on batteries in Power Shift: Keywords for a New Politics of Energy and on conflicts over proposed mining and road development in the Ring of Fire region (Treaty No. 9 territory, northern Ontario) in Energy Humanities. In 2024, I co-authored a report, "Greenwashing the Ring of Fire: Indigenous Jurisdiction and Gaps in the EV Battery Supply Chain," as part of the Infrastructure Beyond Extractivism project. My doctoral research has been published in the journals Canadian Literature and English Studies in Canada. My article, "Cracks, Gaps, and Oil Spills in the Settler-Colonial Symbolic Order: Confronting Socio-Ecological Antagonism in Canada," received the Honourable Mention for the 2024 F.E.L. Priestley Prize awarded by the Association of Canadian College and University Teachers of English (ACCUTE). Beyond academia, I work with organizations and communities advocating for better wages and working conditions, affordable housing, and improved access to infrastructure.

I am affiliated with the following organizations and projects:

Institute for Environment, Conservation, and Sustainability (IECS): https://utscenvironment.ca/
Infrastructure Beyond Extractivism (IBE): https://jurisdiction-infrastructure.com/
Trade Unions and Labour Environmentalism Network (TULE): https://tulelabour.org/

Publications

Thornley, Isaac. “Battery: Can Batteries Foster a Radically Just Energy Transition?” In Power Shift: Keywords for a New Politics of Energy, edited by Imre Szeman and Jennifer Wenzel. Morgantown: West Virginia University Press, 2025: 53–56.

Thornley, Isaac. “Ring of Fire Conflict Reveals Gaps in Ontario’s Economic Nationalist EV Battery Fantasy.” Energy Humanities, April 1, 2025. https://www.energyhumanities.ca/news/ring-of-fire-conflict-reveals-gaps-....

Desai, Saima and Isaac Thornley. “Greenwashing the Ring of Fire: Indigenous Jurisdiction and the Gaps in the EV Battery Supply Chain.” Infrastructure Beyond Extractivism. February 2024, https://jurisdiction-infrastructure.com/research/greenwashing-the-ring-o....

Thornley, Isaac. “The Settler-Colonial Jouissance of Western Alienation: Mapping the Ideological Terrain of Canadian Pipeline Politics.” Canadian Literature, 253 (2023): 120-147. https://canlit.ca/article/the-settler-colonial-jouissance-of-western-ali....

Thornley, Isaac. “Cracks, Gaps, and Oil Spills in the Settler-Colonial Symbolic Order: Confronting Socio-Ecological Antagonism in Canada.” English Studies in Canada (ESC), 47, no. 2-3 (2021): 9-35. https://ojs.lib.uwo.ca/index.php/esc/article/view/17503.