Life off the grid: the study of solar infrastructure and ethical subjects

• Applicant: Dr. Eva Riedke
• Subject Area: Social and Cultural Anthropology and Ethnology
• Term: since 2021
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 463052569

From an ethnographic perspective, the project follows the life cycle of “off grid” solar home systems – from their conception and design in the Global North to their commercialization and use in the Global South. The provision of electricity is an integral part of the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals, with around one billion people still living disconnected from the grid. Solar products have become an iconic “bottom of the pyramid technology” in many sub-Saharan African countries, with market analysts even suggesting that “a race to solar power in Africa” is currently unfolding. The research project is concerned with exploring the logics, assumptions, principles and meaning-making practices of those who develop and market off-grid solar products, as well as with the day-to-day experiences, reflections, negotiations and critiques of those living “off the grid” in rural Kenya. It follows the proposition that energy hereby offers a particularly useful empirical terrain on which to think through ethics. Based on fieldwork in two solar start-ups in Ulm, the project examines how solar products are inscribed with both an ethic of care for “distant others” as well as with explicit for-profit, commercial interests. Attention is turned to the multiple ethical fields that come to define the solar industry and the ethical knots that those who design and sell solar products grapple with – entangled between environmentalism, activism, and philanthropism. In subsequent fieldwork phases in Kenya, the project focuses on a Kenyan start-up that markets the German solar products as well as on life lived “off” or “under” the grid. It similarly explores the particular “workings” and practices through which electricity and infrastructure become the terrain upon which a loose set of ethical concerns and commitments are debated. In what manner do electricity infrastructures come to feature in deliberative moments of reflection, judgement and scrutiny about “what is” and “what should be”? Further, how do infrastructures and electricity mediate claims to rights, entitlements and citizenship? How does electricity and infrastructure more generally feature in public sentiments of progress, modernity and wellbeing, in aspirations and expectations of a new time, of a “good life”? In answering these questions, the project: a) makes an innovative contribution to the anthropological concern with ethics as grounded in practice (“ordinary ethics”); b) an important research contribution to the field of infrastructure studies, and offers c) valuable empirical and theoretical insights into new figurations of science, (development) politics and markets.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants