Knowledge Transformation in Society (KiTeS), University of Twente 

Supervisors:  dr. Kornelia Konrad, dr. Corelia Baibarac-Duignan

Victoria Kreikle holds a Bachelor’s degree in Political Science and Cultural Anthropology and European Ethnology from Goethe University Frankfurt, as well as a Master’s degree in Science and Technology Studies: Economies, Governance, Life. Her ethnographically informed Master’s thesis, “Ambiguous Utopia? A Multi-Sited Ethnography on Solarpunk,” examined Solarpunk as a socio-technical imaginary and cultural movement shaping renewable energy futures. Alongside her academic work, she is part of the Inbetween Collective, an international collective dedicated to decolonial knowledge practices, storytelling, and experimental formats of collaborative research.

Emerging solar technologies are often presented as neutral solutions to climate change, yet they are embedded in particular social imaginaries about progress, innovation, and sustainability, which in turn shape technological development and are framed by specific values and paradigms. These imaginaries tend to be dominated by expert driven and techno-economic visions, potentially constraining plural, situated, and citizen-led understandings of energy futures. The research problem of this project lies in the limited insight into how competing and co-existing imaginaries of solar futures are produced, negotiated, and stabilized within processes of technological development, particularly in the context of integrated solar PV.

While STS scholarship highlights the performative role of imaginaries in shaping sociotechnical change, how collaborative futuring practices translate imaginaries into concrete design decisions, institutional arrangements, and material infrastructures remains underexplored in the particular case of integrated solar PV.

By investigating existing innovation practices and whose imaginaries shape these technologies, and by facilitating collaborative futuring sessions, this project studies how diverse knowledge forms and values interact in innovation processes, and how these interactions produce discursive (e.g. narratives and framings), material (e.g. design choices and prototypes), social (e.g. alliances and exclusions), and governance outcomes (e.g. rules and decision logics) in relation to integrated solar PV.

It examines how imaginaries are communicated and expressed (e.g. through visuals, policy scenarios, and prototypes) among citizens, experts and institutions, how they influence the direction and governance of innovation, and how these governance modes and innovation paradigms, in turn, shape imaginaries of novel integrated solar PV technologies.

This project is part of SolarLab NL, a Dutch National Growth Fund program.