Energy Worlds in Experiment

Laura Watts is a writer, poet, ethnographer of futures, and Senior Lecturer in Energy & Society within Geosciences, University of Edinburgh. As a science and technology stud- ies (STS) scholar, her research is concerned with the effect of ‘edge’ landscapes on how the future is imagined and made, along with an exploration of different writing methods. For the past decade she has been working with people and places around energy futures in the Orkney islands, Scotland. Her latest book Energy at the End of the World: An Orkney Islands Saga (MIT Press) was shortlisted for the Saltire Research Book of the Year, and she won the International Cultural Innovation Prize 2017, as part of the Reconstrained Design Group, for a community-built energy storage device designed from spare parts. For more on her work see www.sand14.com.

Brit Ross Winthereik is full Professor at the IT University of Copenhagen in the Technologies in Practice group and head of the Center for Digital Welfare. She has published on public sector digitalisation, information infrastructures, and ethnography for anthropology and STS audiences. She is co-author of Monitoring Movements in Development Aid: Recursive Infrastructures and Partnerships (MIT Press, 2013) with Casper Bruun Jensen, and co-editor of Electrifying Anthropology: Exploring Electrical Practices and Infrastructures (Bloomsbury, 2019) with Simone Abram and Thomas Yarrow, and of Experimenting with Ethnography: A Companion to Analysis (Duke, 2021) with Andrea Ballestero. She is part of the Anthropology of Technology network which edits Handbook for the Anthropology of Technology (Palgrave Handbook Series, 2022). She is a frequent participant in public debates on issues related to public digitalization, and appointed member of the Digital Advisory Council for the Academy of the Technical Sciences in Denmark. She was PI of the Alien Energy project (2013–2016) and of the Data as Relation project (2017–2020).