Brit Ross Winthereik (Principal Investigator)
Associate Professor. As PI I am responsible for navigating the complexity of the individual parts of the project. One of my big research interests is how people account for what they do and how such accounts are translated as they encounter other accounts, for example when entering into a digital realm (see e.g. my forthcoming book Monitoring Movements). In Alien Energy I take my interest in accountability practices seriously in a different way by caring for relations between the individual research projects as well as with funders and other stakeholders. As one of its ‘products’, Alien Energy will create a mobile ethnographic exhibition. It is one of my tasks to keep thinking about our exhibition in methodological terms as a laboratory for collaboration and knowledge creation.
Laura Watts (Co-Investigator and Researcher in Orkney)
Associate Professor. I am concerned with how the future gets made in high-tech industry, and how it might be made otherwise. As an ethnographer I am interested in the effect of landscape on how the future is imagined and made in everyday practice. How might the future be made differently in different places? I am also interested in the effect of different ethnographic writing practices as part of an apparatus for making knowledge, and for making futures.
Louise Torntoft Jensen (Researcher in Denmark)
PhD Fellow. With research interests in Science and Technology Studies (STS), Actor-network theory (ANT), Post-ANT, Anthropology, Ethnography, Knowledge creation and meeting places, Friction, Renewable energy, Future-making, Smart Grids, Infrastructure, Peripheries and Intervention. I am currently on maternity leave but back again by May 2015.
James Maguire (Researcher in Iceland)
PhD Fellow. As part of the Alien Energy Research group at TiP I am returning to Iceland for my doctoral work where I will be focusing on energy controversies and possibilities, investigating the manner in which energy underwrites multiple dimensions of social, political and economic life in Iceland. In particular, I will focus on the way in which renewable technologies reconfigure relations at particular sites and the varying effects and consequences such reconfigurations have for multiple actors in the vicinity. In general terms, the project is interested in how energy issues remodulate politics, places and potential futures in the search for re-imagined energy lives.
Simon Carstensen (Researcher in Denmark)
Research Assistant. As part of the Alien Energy project I am conducting fieldwork on ‘testing’ in Danish wave energy. More specifically my concern is with the practices and materialities of wave energy testing at various test sites in Denmark and the kinds of technological futures that are imagined there. I’m interested in how technological objects are imagined in testing – how technological potentials are demonstrated as part of different landscapes and cultural imaginaries and how these potentials in turn are mobilized in making the sector a visible part of a broader energy arena.
Rebecca Ford (researcher in Orkney)
I am a PhD student at University of the Highlands and Islands, Centre for Nordic Studies, based in Orkney. My research project ‘Words and Waves: a dialogical approach to discourse, community, and marine renewables in Stromness, Orkney’ , is looking at the role of narrative within discourse communities, and how this shapes their interaction. As part of the Alien Energy project I am carrying out fieldwork looking at the ‘Invisible Work’ carried out by EMEC both within the community of Orkney, and in the wider world.