Energy: everywhere and nowhere; an ethereal materialsemiotic; a measurement; both alien and familiar; both particle and wave; and a highly-charged political debate. Whether green or low-carbon, geothermal or generated by sunlight, energy has long been on the forefront of social and cultural worlds– worlds are made with energy, and energy makes worlds. Energy infrastructures and the public understanding of energy have been a long-term concern in Science and Technology Studies (STS). More recently, anthropology has taken energy to its core. So how might we make interventions into this familiar-alien ‘energy’ and its worlds? 

Over the past three years, the Alien Energy project has conducted ethnographic studies of water-based renewable energy (wave, tide, and geothermal energy) at the edge of Europe (see www.alienenergy.dk). We have found ‘experiment’ to be generative in our project–most noticeably in The Energy Walk, an experimental, ethnographic installation in the landscape.

This workshop will be a site for participants to come together around experiments in writing, in ontology, in method, in materiality, in collectivity, in community, in policy, in politics. We invite you to join us in thinking and performing connections across field sites and analytic registers. During the workshop, we will explore the connections between these, and develop a series of conversations that will be published together in a peer-reviewed form (either journal special issue or book). We welcome risky as well as well-considered experiments.