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3 books match the query 'Günel, Gökçe'

cover of Floating Power: Energy, Infrastructure, and South-South Relations

Floating Power

Energy, Infrastructure, and South-South Relations

Gökçe Günel

Duke University Press, 2026

Floating Power considers the role of energy production on an international scale, challenging the idea that new infrastructures wholly replace older sources of energy. Shifting the discussion from energy transition to energy accumulation, Gökçe Günel engages with a range of electricity producers including hydroelectric, heavy fuel oil, natural gas, and solar power plants, noting their intersections as societies work to expand their supply at large rather than focus on one type of source. Günel uses the Ayşegül Sultan, a Turkish-built floating power plant in Ghana, as a prime example and vehicle to explore how state and corporate intervention impact energy technologies as every nation strives toward infrastructural expansion. Floating Power challenges the linear thinking and substitutive logic of mainstream energy discourse, instead showing how various power sources often expand and grow symbiotically.
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cover of Patchwork Ethnography: A Methodological Guide

Patchwork Ethnography

A Methodological Guide

Gökçe Günel and Chika Watanabe

University of Chicago Press, 2027

Offers an accessible new way to think critically and transparently about how researchers, especially those doing ethnographic work, can balance their personal commitments with long-term research.

For ethnographers, spending a year or longer in a faraway place conducting fieldwork is increasingly untenable amid life responsibilities, rising workloads, and constraints imposed by disability, precarity, and geopolitical factors. If ethnographic methods are to remain viable and broadly relevant for a diverse group of people in anthropology and beyond, Gökçe Günel and Chika Watanabe argue, we need to examine how our personal and professional lives intersect and shape one another.

In Patchwork Ethnography, Günel and Watanabe take seriously the conditions that render long-term fieldwork difficult for so many. Without being prescriptive, the book offers concrete ways for scholars to unpack competing commitments and make the attendant challenges more manageable. Blending theoretical analysis with practical exercises, the authors guide readers to rethink the relationship between their personal lives and their scholarship. Ultimately, they point to ways to transform limitations into catalysts for fresh insights. By highlighting how shifting labor and living conditions profoundly alter knowledge production, Patchwork Ethnography calls for a paradigm shift in ethnographic research.

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cover of Spaceship in the Desert: Energy, Climate Change, and Urban Design in Abu Dhabi

Spaceship in the Desert

Energy, Climate Change, and Urban Design in Abu Dhabi

Gökçe Günel

Duke University Press, 2019

In 2006 Abu Dhabi launched an ambitious project to construct the world’s first zero-carbon city: Masdar City. In Spaceship in the Desert Gökçe Günel examines the development and construction of Masdar City's renewable energy and clean technology infrastructures, providing an illuminating portrait of an international group of engineers, designers, and students who attempted to build a post-oil future in Abu Dhabi. While many of Masdar's initiatives—such as developing a new energy currency and a driverless rapid transit network—have stalled or not met expectations, Günel analyzes how these initiatives contributed to rendering the future a thinly disguised version of the fossil-fueled present. Spaceship in the Desert tells the story of Masdar, at once a “utopia” sponsored by the Emirati government, and a well-resourced company involving different actors who participated in the project, each with their own agendas and desires.
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