What happens when the future arrives in one small municipality all at once?
Huge congratulations to my MA student, Emilia Srebrna, on a brilliant thesis defence and an excellent piece of research! 🎓👏
Her thesis, Future in the Making. Sociotechnical Imaginaries of Energy Transition in Choczewo Municipality (Przyszłość w budowie. Socjotechniczne imaginaria transformacji energetycznej w Gminie Choczewo), grew out of fieldwork in and around Choczewo, on the Polish Baltic coast — a place that is becoming an extraordinary laboratory of technological and social transformation.
A nuclear power plant, offshore wind farms, AI data centres, and entirely new infrastructures are being planned and built there, potentially reshaping the future of the region in almost every imaginable dimension. But technologies do not simply “arrive” in places. They arrive together with visions of the future, promises, expectations, conflicts, and competing ideas about what a desirable future should look like, and who gets to define it.
This is precisely what Emilia explored through the lens of Science and Technology Studies and sociotechnical imaginaries, as part of the development of our new STS research and teaching pathway at the Jagiellonian University. And, very appropriately, the Baltic Sea itself made a personal appearance at the defence :) 🌊
Congratulations, Emilia! It was a great pleasure to supervise this research. I am keeping my fingers crossed for the next step and wishing you every success with your PhD applications. I very much hope this is only the beginning of your research journey!
Many thanks also to Prof. Maria ĹšwiÄ…tkiewicz-Mosny for reviewing the thesis and to Prof. Aleksandra Wagner for serving on the examination committee and for the excellent discussion.
#ScienceTechnologyStudies #SociotechnicalImaginaries #EnergyTransition #FutureMaking #JagiellonianUniversity