Dr. Gretchen Bakke
Affiliate Scholar
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.
From 2018 to 2020 she was a Guest Professor at the Institute of European Ethnology at Humboldt University in Berlin and is she is also currently a Visiting Researcher at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin, within the research theme Anthropocene Formations. In October of 2021 Bakke received a Heisenberg Fellowship from the DFG which will allow her to remain at RIFS for the next five years and hopefully beyond.
- Changes to electricity systems with the mass-integration of renewables
- Ethnographic investigations of the end of fossil fuel dominance in the energy sector and beyond
- The imagination and its rhetorics, temporal folding and future dreaming, building and dismantling, collapse and renewal, discomfort and all that remains unrecoupable
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