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…
“This is how I was born, how my creator, Victor Frankenstein, sparked me into energetic life…” So began my performance-paper at 4S 2015 (Society for Social Studies of Science) and AAA 2015 (American Anthropological Association) in Denver. I performed a character who haunts the islands of Orkney, abandoned out of hubris after her creation by…
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).…
In September 2014 I gave a paper-performance on my poetic research methods at the Department for Thematic Studies, Social and Technical Change (TEMA-T), Linköping University. In the discussion we talked about the effect of performing a paper, the effect of poetic words, compared to a standard academic presentation: one effect is the silence that comes…
The ‘Energy Walk’ is an ethnographic installation in the landscape. It weaves together the sand dunes and harbour seascape of the Danish Wave Energy Center, in Hanstholm, Denmark, with other landscapes at the energy edge: marine energy in Orkney islands, Scotland, and geothermal energy in Iceland. Over a 40 minute journey it offers you stories,…
This art book is my second collaboration with Orkney publisher and poet, Alistair Peebles. This time we have been working with the wonderful artist and designers, Rachel Barron and Nathan Clydesdale. Dawn Nafus, anthropologist from Intel Labs, and I wrote the text during an exploration of how our two fieldsites re-imagined ‘Big Data’. Together we…
As part of my PhD Thesis, I created a series of stories that were interventions into the future of the mobile telecoms industry. ‘Sand14’ is a story that forms a diffraction (as Donna Haraway might say) of my ethnography at a major mobile phone manufacturer in the Thames Valley UK. The ‘story suite’ is the…
Online collection of experimental writing. I had the honour of running a Creative Writing workshop for PhD students, Writing Imaginaries, Making Futures as part of the Intergender Network, at the Blekinge Institute of Technology, March 2012. The workshop was inspired by the question: “What if the study and crafting of fiction and fact happened explicitly,…
How might we reconsider what infrastructure is, and how might we design it differently? For example, what kinds of connectivity infrastructure would reflect the kinds of futures that people in the Orkney Islands might aspire to? How does that change we think about connectivity infrastructures elsewhere? What happens when ‘monument’, ‘sea’, and ‘stone’ are key…
My PhD thesis on A Future Archaeology of the Mobile Telecoms Industry (completed 2007) is available to read online. This thesis weaves together two ethnographic stories, one in London and the other in the Orkney Islands. It considers how futures are made in the made in the mobile telecoms industry, and how they might be…