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Between 2009 and 2013 Cymene Howe and Dominic Boyer conducted fieldwork in Mexico's Isthmus of Tehuantepec to examine the political, social, and ecological dimensions of moving from fossil fuels to wind power. Their work manifested itself as a new ethnographic form: the duograph—a combination of two single-authored books that draw on shared fieldsites, archives, and encounters that can be productively read together, yet can also stand alone in their analytic ambitions. In his volume, Energopolitics, Boyer examines the politics of wind power and how it is shaped by myriad factors, from the legacies of settler colonialism and indigenous resistance to state bureaucracy and corporate investment. Drawing on interviews with activists, campesinos, engineers, bureaucrats, politicians, and bankers, Boyer outlines the fundamental impact of energy and fuel on political power. Boyer also demonstrates how large conceptual frameworks cannot adequately explain the fraught and uniquely complicated conditions on the isthmus, illustrating the need to resist narratives of anthropocenic universalism and to attend to local particularities.

In this article, I discuss the three dominant models of conceiving infrastructural futures in the context of the contemporary ecological emergency and what kinds of futures each model enables and forestalls. Gray infrastructure conceives human-engineered material designs that are able to produce predictable, controllable effects, often at a mass scale. Gray infrastructure also conceives futures that by and large reproduce present Anthropocene relations (e.g., a strict nature/culture divide mediated by technology and human supremacy. Green infrastructure is a more diverse paradigm but generally speaking pursues naturecultural collaborations that seek to bend the Anthropocene trajectory. Still, much of what passes for green infrastructure today fails to challenge industrial-capitalist logics and in this way creates futures that are more reproductive of the Anthropocene trajectory than they intend. Finally, I discuss my concept of "revolutionary infrastructure" as an alternative to gray and green infrastructural imagination. Revolutionary infrastructure resists standardization and categorization but generally appears as local experimental enabling relations, as redirection of potential energy, and as transformational pathways toward non-ecocidal, non-genocidal futures.

Between 2009 and 2013 Cymene Howe and Dominic Boyer conducted fieldwork in Mexico's Isthmus of Tehuantepec to examine the political, social, and ecological dimensions of moving from fossil fuels to wind power. Their work manifested itself as a new ethnographic form: the duograph—a combination of two single-authored books that draw on shared fieldsites, archives, and encounters that can be productively read together, yet can also stand alone in their analytic ambitions. In his volume, Energopolitics, Boyer examines the politics of wind power and how it is shaped by myriad factors, from the legacies of settler colonialism and indigenous resistance to state bureaucracy and corporate investment. Drawing on interviews with activists, campesinos, engineers, bureaucrats, politicians, and bankers, Boyer outlines the fundamental impact of energy and fuel on political power. Boyer also demonstrates how large conceptual frameworks cannot adequately explain the fraught and uniquely complicated conditions on the isthmus, illustrating the need to resist narratives of anthropocenic universalism and to attend to local particularities.

Between 2009 and 2013 Cymene Howe and Dominic Boyer conducted fieldwork in Mexico's Isthmus of Tehuantepec to examine the political, social, and ecological dimensions of moving from fossil fuels to wind power. Their work manifested itself as a new ethnographic form: the duograph—a combination of two single-authored books that draw on shared fieldsites, archives, and encounters that can be productively read together, yet can also stand alone in their analytic ambitions. In his volume, Energopolitics, Boyer examines the politics of wind power and how it is shaped by myriad factors, from the legacies of settler colonialism and indigenous resistance to state bureaucracy and corporate investment. Drawing on interviews with activists, campesinos, engineers, bureaucrats, politicians, and bankers, Boyer outlines the fundamental impact of energy and fuel on political power. Boyer also demonstrates how large conceptual frameworks cannot adequately explain the fraught and uniquely complicated conditions on the isthmus, illustrating the need to resist narratives of anthropocenic universalism and to attend to local particularities.

This special collection of Anthropological Quarterly aims to spark new ways of thinking about formations and operations of modern power. Specifically, the articles explore how energic forces and infrastructures interrelate with institutions and ideations of political power. In the hope of fanning sparks into flames, we juxtapose this process of exploration with the influential paradigm of "biopower" developed by Michel Foucault. All of the essays explore how modalities of "biopower" (the management of life and population) today depend in crucial respects upon modalities of energopower (the harnessing of electricity and fuel) and vice-versa. We emphasize especially the critical importance of exploring the juncture of biopower and energopower in the context of the rising importance of scientific and political discourse on anthropogenic climate change. As human use of energy is increasingly linked to the disruption and destruction of conditions of life (human and otherwise), the tensions between dominant energopolitical systems (like carbon fuel) and biopolitical projects (like sustainability) are increasingly evident, opening new possibilities of anthropological analysis. Both energopower and biopower, we conclude, are entering into a pivotal transitional phase.

This article explores the connection between digital media practices and digital (self-) understandings in western news journalism today. I describe how German and US online journalists translate their experiential familiarity with a plethora of digital information and communication technologies into narratives of digital expertise that contrast their "non-linear," "iterative," "interactive," and "network" modes of thinking from the journalistic expertise of traditional (broadcast) journalism. I view online news journalists' narratives of digital expertise as exemplary of the cybernetic and informatic epistemologies that developed in the wake of the industrialization of computation before the Second World War and that exerted a profound influence over the analytic methods and theories of the postwar human sciences as well. I thus compare digital thinking in news journalism and postwar anthropology in order to illuminate how technically-enabled practices of knowledge formation influence expert modes of understanding human social life.