Events

CHAIRPERSON

Assoc Prof Jiat Hwee Chang, Asia Research Institute, and Department of Architecture, National University of Singapore

PROGRAM

ABSTRACT

This is a roundtable discussion of The Current Economy: Electricity Markets and Techno-Economics by Canay Özden-Schilling (Stanford University Press, 2021), an ethnography of electricity markets in the United States that shows the heterogenous and technologically inflected nature of economic expertise today. Based on ethnographic fieldwork among market data analysts, electric grid engineers, and citizen activists, this book provides a deep dive into the convoluted economy of electricity and its reverberations throughout daily life.

Canay Özden-Schilling argues that many of the economic formations in everyday life come from work cultures rarely suspected of doing economic work—cultures of science, technology, and engineering—that often do not have a claim to economic theory or practice, yet nonetheless dictate forms of economic activity. Contributing to economic anthropology, science and technology studies, energy studies, and the anthropology of expertise, this book is a map of the everyday infrastructures of economy and energy into which we are plugged as denizens of a technological world.

ABOUT THE SPEAKERS

Canay Özden-Schilling is an anthropologist of capitalism, technology, and infrastructures, with past and ongoing research projects on markets of electricity and global port logistics. Broadly, she is interested in the scientific and technological work cultures that create and disseminate the economic formations with which we live. Her first book, The Current Economy: Electricity Markets and Techno-Economics (Stanford University Press, 2021), is an ethnography of the electric grid in the United States in the age of competitive markets and smart grids. Her second book-length project explores global supply chain logistics, as seen from the port cities of Mersin (Turkey) and Singapore.

Victor Seow is a historian of technology, science, and industry, who specializes in China and Japan and in histories of energy and work. He is the author of Carbon Technocracy: Energy Regimes in Modern East Asia (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021), a study that examines the relationship between energy and power through the history of China’s onetime coal capital. His current project is a history of industrial psychology in China, through which he seeks to explore how work became an object of scientific inquiry and how the sciences of work shaped and were shaped by broader social discourses about the nature and value of labor.

Taomo Zhou is Assistant Professor of History at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, specializing in modern Chinese and Southeast Asian history. Her writings have appeared in publications such as Journal of Asian Studies, Diplomatic History, The China Quarterly, Critical Asian Studies, The Journal Indonesia, and Made in China Journal. Taomo’s first book, Migration in the Time of Revolution: China, Indonesia and the Cold War (Cornell University Press, 2019), is a Foreign Affairs “Best Books of 2020” and has received an Honorable Mention for the Harry J. Benda Prize from the Association for Asian Studies. Taomo is working on a new research project on Shenzhen—the first Special Economic Zone (SEZ) of China—and its connections with the Export Processing Zones (EPZ) and free ports across Southeast Asia.

REGISTRATION

Registration is closed, and instructions on how to participate in this webinar has been sent out to registered attendees. Please write to aritm@nus.edu.sg if you would like to attend the webinar.