CAREER: Tracing Cultural Histories and Socio-Technical Dynamics of Uneven Power Grids

This project reevaluates conventional wisdom on global electrification efforts and enhances Science and Technical Studies (STS) knowledge on Large Socio-Technical Systems (LTS) by examining the ethical, environmental, and political nature of uneven electric grids. It is a timely research and pedagogical project. Despite the push for increased electricity use to address environmental issues as well as poverty, unreliable and costly electricity is becoming more common.

In low-income countries, electricity is often unstable and expensive, while in high-income countries, extreme weather and aging infrastructure are causing outages and rising costs. This project seeks to 1) understand how communities with varying socioeconomic statuses and power navigate vulnerable service conditions, 2) establish theoretical and empirical knowledge on the normalization of infrastructure services, and 3) use interdisciplinary scholarship to examine how oversimplified assumptions in energy studies affect rule and technology choices.

In addition to promoting research that will inform looming energy debates, the project will expand the role of STS scholarship in cultural forums and for a wide audience by facilitating cross-regional outreach and public engagement via forums, books, websites, visual arts and film.

At a broad level, this project seeks to understand the evolution and differences between grid systems across the globe. It focuses on ordinary workers and consumers, understudied yet instrumental actors in infrastructure development, and the everyday experiences and subjectivities produced by varying energy networks. By comparing both the history and the current moment of electrification in regions with distinct politics, cultures, and supposed values, it explores how differing communities navigate electrical disruptions during times of network expansion, whether normalization of unreliable services hinders meaningful system changes, and how a comparative, mixed-methods approach can generate new insights in infrastructure studies.

Using rigorous historiographic methods, ethnographic fieldwork, interviews, and document analysis, combined with systematic interpretations of reliability measurements, the findings will generalize technical phenomena into lived sociocultural experience and practice. It will also establish important pedagogical materials for understanding how vulnerabilities and opportunities are spread, by whom and for whom, along the grid.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.