Róisín Kennelly
DPhil Student
Keble College
Research Key Words:
Energy anthropology; energy transitions; climate change; island studies; science and technology studies; renewable energy; energy islands; imaginaries; infrastructure; futures; ethnography.
Research Interests:
Róisín’s doctoral research explores energy transitions, climate change, and the making of futures in the North Atlantic, where wind, sea, and electricity are increasingly entangled with everyday life. Bringing together perspectives from anthropology, science and technology studies (STS), human geography, and island studies, she examines how changing energy systems are encountered, understood, and imagined through the rhythms of daily life, local histories, embodied futures, and enduring relationships with place.
Róisín’s work in the Faroe Islands offer a distinctive vantage point from which to think about small island energy transitions beyond questions of technology alone. Her research asks how renewable energy becomes part of lived experience: how it reshapes the ways people imagine the future, inhabit island landscapes and seascapes, and negotiate continuity and change in a time of environmental, geopolitical, and infrastructural transformation.
She is based in the School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography (SAME) and the Institute for Science, Innovation and Society (InSIS), and has been a visiting researcher at the University of the Faroe Islands.