Swedish Electricity as a Prognostication Infrastructure: Infrastructural Inclusion, Exclusion, Resilience, and Vulnerability

In 20th century Sweden, electricity and notions of modern life co-evolved.

While constant access to affordable electricity became embraced as societal right, a democratically distributed asset, electricity became a steadily expanding, but also invisible part of life.

With rising electricity prices and warnings of power shortage, when the winter of 2022 approached, electricity had moved from the background to the foreground of experience.

While people in their struggle to cope put great efforts into trying to predict the flows and cost of electricity, they in turn read out clues about processes far beyond the physical infrastructure itself.

This anthropological research project launches an investigation into how electricity was transformed into a prognostication infrastructure.

Starting in people’s homes and their everyday electricity predictions, it focuses on how these shape experiences of infrastructural vulnerability, resilience, inclusion and exclusion.

To promote socially sustainable infrastructures, it is essential to move beyond an understanding of infrastructure as simply a technical matter and embrace it as an intrinsically social construction – assembled through users’ engagements and readings.

This project presents a novel investigation into how people’s infrastructural prognostications shape their experiences of resilience, vulnerability, inclusion, exclusion, societal rights, democracy, and ultimately visions of Sweden as a modern nation and their place in it.