Dr. Gretchen Bakke
Affiliate Scholar
As fossil fuels gradually lose their purchase, industrially as much as financially, small grapplings with the interrelated challenges of changing economic structures, transportation infrastructures, the shifting natural world are everywhere emergent. What differentiates the Scottish communities of the North Sea where this research is conducted is that there the effects of oil’s quiet passing are both intensified and already pressing. Fieldwork is conducted in the rural communities of the Shetland Islands in their engagements with the sea and with oil and in the former oil boomtown of Aberdeen and its offshore assets. Care is taken to understand the interconnected well-being of sea creatures, offshore infrastructures, oil workers, and regular folks as each contends with changing environments that force movement upon even the most recalcitrant entities (from molluscs to Shell). My goal is to understand how this change is happening as a mode of investigating the pragmatics of a life no-longer premised upon oil as both adaptative and proactive responses come to characterize to the latter days of this long historical epoch.
Gretchen Bakke joined RIFS as Senior Fellow in April 2021 in the midst of the quiet of the pandemic. She is a writer, photographer, and ethnographer with a strong interest in socio-cultural transformations and, most especially, the material dimensions of substantive change. She is the author of the The Grid: The Fraying Wires Between America and Our Energy Future (2016) and The Likeness (2020).
Bakke moved to Berlin from Montreal in 2018. From 2018 to 2020 she was a Guest Professor at the Institute of European Ethnology at Humboldt University in Berlin, where she now holds DFG funded a Heisenberg Professorship. Her current research is on changing power relations in and around the North Sea.
- Sozialer und technologischer Wandel
- Energie und Umwelt
- Mensch-Maschine-Interaktionen
- Männer und Männlichkeit
- Anthropologie der Wissenschaft und Technologie
- Anthropologie der Kunst und Ästhetik, Infrastruktur, Bürokratie
- Ehemalige Sowjetunion, Ex-Jugoslawien, Nordsee, Nordamerika
Publications at the RIFS
Publications prior to joining the RIFS
MONOGRAPHS
- The Likeness: Semblance and Self in Slovene Society. University of California Press 2020
- The Grid: The Fraying Wires Between America and Our Energy Future. New York: Bloomsbury, 2016.
Edited Volumes
- Anthropology of the Arts: A Reader. ed. with Marina Peterson, London: Bloomsbury, 2016
- Between Matter and Method: Encounters in Anthropology and Art. ed. with Marina Peterson, London: Bloomsbury, 2017
BOOK CHAPTERS
- 2022 "Refrigerator as Linchpin: A Brief History of the Fossil Fueled Electricity System" Handbook of Energy Humanities, G. Macdonald and J. Stewart eds. London: Routledge (forthcoming).
- 2021 "Pivoting toward Energy Transition 2.0: Learning from Electricity," Research Handbook on Energy and Society, Webb, Tingey, and Wade eds., Cheltenham UK: Edward Elgar Publishing: 98-111.
- 2019 "Electricity is not a Noun," Electrifying Anthropology: Explorations in Electric Practices and Infrastructures, Abram, Yarrow and Winthereik eds. New York: Bloomsbury: 25-42.
- 2019 "Crude Thinking," The Rhetoric of Oil in the Twenty-First Century: Government, Corporate and Activist Discourses. Graves and Gordon. eds. London: Routledge: 34-55.
OTHER
- 2021 "What Fuels You?" in Solarities: Inflections and Refractions, A. Moore, C. Howe and J. Diamanti eds. New York: Punctum Books (forthcoming)
- 2019 "Inland Tide Tables," "Raining Red Wisconsin, or, The Weather Takes Over," and "Steam Power" in Almanac for the Beyond, J. Faris ed. Honolulu: Tropic Editions: 45; 48-53; 86.
- "Coalthink," The Big Picture: Infrastructure, Public Books. October 17, 2017. Link here
- "Venezuela's Electricity Crises: A Cautionary Tale," The New Yorker, May 17, 2016. Link here