Orkney Electron Poetics at University of Stirling

I’ve been invited to give both a performance and presentation at the Connecting with a low-carbon future conference this month. This conference is part of the Royal Society of Edinburgh Research Network – Connecting with a low-carbon Scotland. The following is an outline of what I will perform and discuss. Hope to see a few local Scottish and northern colleagues!

The event is being hosted by Centre for Environment, Heritage and Policy, University of Stirling, on 19-20 April. More here.

Orkney Electron Poetics

A performance and discussion of a series of poems on the energy futures being imagined and made in Orkney. For the last ten years I have been researching and writing about the people and places creating renewable energy in Orkney. The islands generated over 104% of their electricity from their local environmental resource, from their wind, waves, and tides, and regularly export their ‘Orkney electrons’ south to the rest of Scotland. They have more micro wind turbines and more electric cars per person than anywhere else in the country, and for the last ten years have been a test site for world firsts in both smart grid and marine energy technology– they are the site of the European Marine Energy Centre, the world’s first and longest running grid connected test site for wave and tide energy.

I am an ethnographer and a poet, and in my ethnographic and poetic collaborations I have composed a number of works that explore how these energy futures are being made ‘at the edge’–both at the geographic periphery and at the leading edge of sustainable energy futures. These poetic works explore both Orkney and the electrons it generates.