(http://www.culanth.org/) Log In (/login) | Contact Us (mailto:culanth@culanth.org) | Join SCA (http://www.americananthro.org/ConnectWithAAA/Content.aspx? ItemNumber=1945&navItemNumber=764) Search Electric Potentials: An Interview with Gökçe Günel by Andrés García Molina The November 2015 issue of Cultural Anthropology included the Openings and Retrospectives collection “ Anthropology Electric (../../../articles/788- anthropology-electric) ,” edited by Dominic Boyer. What follows is an interview contributing editor Andrés García Molina conducted with Gökçe Günel, who is a lecturer in the Department of Anthropology at Columbia University, about the collection and its connections to her own work. Gökçe Günel received her PhD in anthropology from Cornell University in 2012. Her book manuscript, Spaceship in the Desert: Energy, Climate Change, and Green Business in Abu Dhabi, under contract with Duke University Press, focuses on the construction of renewable energy and clean technology infrastructures in the United Arab Emirates. (https://typhoon- production.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/image_attachment/image_attachment/2388/IMG_1728.JPG) Gökçe Günel conducted research on renewable energy and clean technology in Abu Dhabi in 2010–2011. Photo: Arda Doğan. Andrés García Molina: As a matter of introduction, could you describe the projects you are working on and how they relate to the general topic of an “anthropology electric?” Gökçe Günel: Broadly speaking, my research explores how researchers, professionals, and policymakers conceptualize and construct emergent infrastructures of energy generation and climate change mitigation. Focusing on the individual as well as the institutional levels, I chart the imaginaries that guide the production of knowledge, technology, and governance on renewable energy and clean technology, while analyzing the multiple paradoxes that spring from their implementation. In his contribution to the collection (../../../articles/790-an-anthropology-of-electricity-from-the-global) , Akhil Gupta suggests that we have “to reimagine electricity use in the future that does not simply seek to extend the patterns of the present” (564), pointing out how “what is at stake here are different ideas about the future” (566). By working with researchers, professionals, and policymakers who create new energy infrastructures, I document and examine this process of reimagination, interrogate if and how it extends the patterns of the present, and map the ways in which the future of energy becomes contested. Currently, I’m revising my book manuscript, which investigates the construction of renewable energy and clean technology infrastructures in oil-rich Abu Dhabi as the era of abundant oil supplies slowly comes to an end. The book centers on Masdar, a multifaceted renewable energy and clean technology company sponsored by the Abu Dhabi government. Drawing on seventeen months of multi-sited fieldwork at Masdar, as well as at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), the book demonstrates that Abu Dhabi’s renewable energy and clean technology projects, such as Masdar City, fuel an aspiration to make ecological problems manageable, such that business models and design solutions will contain and resolve climate change without surrendering hopes for increased productivity and technological complexity.