Book coming soon… Energy at the End of the World: an Orkney Islands Saga tells the story of how these islands are making their own energy future, from marine energy to hydrogen fuel, at what some see as the edge of the world. “Mixing storytelling and ethnography, empiricism and lyricism, Watts tells an Orkney energy…
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…
My publications are now listed on this website. You will find all my papers, book chapters, essays, and poems listed there, with links to available downloads. My academia.edu page is still active, for those who use that service. Recent projects that include more diverse media and unpublished content are also available on this site. Much…
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…
This book chapter began as a performance keynote at 4S/EASST 2012 annual conference in Copenhagen. Lucy Suchman, Pelle Ehn, and myself were asked to consider the conference theme ‘Design and Displacement: Social Studies of Science and Technology’ and how that might be situated in different places around the world. (Inspired by the Orkney Mailboats project).…