Latest news Shortlisted for Saltire Research Book of the Year 2019. Longlisted for the Highland Book Prize 2019. “The greatest contribution of Watts’s book, and it is a striking one, is that the Orcadian idiom for talking about energy infrastructures is… relationships – and relationships necessarily involve pasts, presents and futures.” – The Times Literary…
As part of our Mozilla Research Grant funded project, Orkney Cloud, I am really excited to announce the publication of our first Orkney Cloud magazine. The magazine is an anthology of Orkney Cloud incubated projects and inspirations; a weaving together of people and possibilities that could become an Orkney Cloud. And it is not comprehensive.…
New book chapter from International network for Social Studies of Marine Energy (ISSMER). As a result of a workshop with representatives from marine energy communities, industry, and policy, we summarised the key ways in which social science and humanities research has a crucial role to play in the development of marine renewable energy. The workshop…
A new book has just been published, authored by members of the International network for Social Studies of Marine Energy (ISSMER). The book is titled ‘Ocean Energy: Governance Challenges for Wave and Tidal Stream Technologies‘ and provides a series of in-depth chapters on the legal, economic, and social concerns around wave and tidal energy technologies.…
This visual poem has just been published in the journal of Cultural Anthropology, as part of their special collection ‘Our Lives with Electric Things’. View the published poem. “Why was the first Pelamis scrapped and not displayed on a plinth?” he asked me. So here is a plinth, perhaps not quite the stone block with…
‘The Draukie’s Tale: Origin Myth for Wave Energy’ poem (first published in the edited collection, Ebban an’ Flowan) has been published for a new audience in Energy Humanities: an Anthology, edited by Imre Szeman and Dominic Boyer (published by John Hopkins University Press). It’s a behemoth 300 page book with almost 50 articles, ranging from…
“Beside a sun-glazed canal in Copenhagen we met for the first time, and realised we shared a similar secret. We were both professional academics and profes- sional artists, but had found that our arts practice was not always visible to our colleagues in Science Studies.” –extract from ‘Letters from Wanna Wonder and the Electric Nemesis’.…
Lexicon for an Anthropocene Yet Unseen is a series published on the Cultural Anthropology journal website. It is a collection of short articles that asks, “What would it take, we wonder, to see this time and its configurations, agencies, and effects otherwise? With this lexicon we hope to develop a resource that is helpful for…
Ebban an’ flowan is the world’s first poetic primer on marine renewable energy. The book focuses on the Orkney islands, as the leading international test site for this nascent energy industry, and expands to reflect on its relationship with the Nordic countries across the sea. Through both language and technology, the book explores how use…
There is a long archaeology of futures in the mobile telecoms industry, futures that have appeared with much fanfare, been forgotten, and then resurrected once more. The ‘watchphone’ (recently popularised by the Apple Watch) is perhaps the most recent example of a walking dead future, with a history and archaeology from decades past. There are…