(C) Gretchen Bakke

Dr. Gretchen Bakke

Senior Fellow

E-Mail
gretchen [dot] bakke [at] iass-potsdam [dot] de

Gretchen Bakke trat dem RIFS im April 2021 als Senior Fellow bei, mitten in der Ruhe der Pandemie. Sie ist Schriftstellerin, Fotografin und Ethnografin mit einem starken Interesse an soziokulturellen Transformationen und insbesondere an den materiellen Dimensionen des substanziellen Wandels.

Von 2018 bis 2020 war sie Gastprofessorin am Institut für Europäische Ethnologie der Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin und ist derzeit Gastwissenschaftlerin am Max-Planck-Institut für Wissenschaftsgeschichte, Berlin, im Forschungsschwerpunkt Anthropozäne Formationen. Im Oktober 2021 erhielt Bakke ein Heisenberg-Stipendium der DFG, das es ihr ermöglichen wird, für die nächsten fünf Jahre und hoffentlich darüber hinaus am RIFS zu bleiben.

  • 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

Publikationen vor der Tätigkeit am 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