The Current Economy: Electricity Markets and Techno-Economics

by Canay Özden-Schilling

Electricity is a quirky commodity: more often than not, it cannot be stored, easily transported, or imported from overseas. Before lighting up our homes, it changes hands through specialized electricity markets that rely on engineering expertise to trade competitively while respecting the physical requirements of the electric grid. The Current Economy is 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.

Genres: Economics, Sociology, Anthropology

224 pages, Hardcover

Published June 15, 2021

About the author

Canay Özden-Schilling is an anthropologist of capitalism, technology, and infrastructure, with past and ongoing research projects on markets of electricity and global port logistics. Broadly, I’m interested in the scientific and technological work cultures that create and disseminate the economic formations with which we live. My 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. Based on fieldwork amongst market data analysts, electric grid engineers, and citizen activists, The Current Economy shows the heterogenous and technologically-inflected nature of economic expertise today. Özden-Schilling's book-length project explores global supply chain logistics, as seen from the port cities of Mersin (Turkey) and Singapore.

Canay Özden-Schilling obtained a Ph.D. degree in 2016 from the History, Anthropology, and Science, Technology, and Society (HASTS) Program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Özden-Schilling holds a M.A. degree in Near Eastern Studies from New York University. Prior to joining NUS, Özden-Schilling was a Mellon-Sawyer postdoctoral fellow in Anthropology at Johns Hopkins University.