Daniela RussUniversity of Leipzig · Global and European Studies Institute
Daniela Russ
Professor
About
21
Publications
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24
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Citations since 2017
Introduction
I am a historical sociologist interested in the relationship between nature and society. My research focuses on the making of energy resources since the 19th century and the development of energy economies in both capitalist and socialist countries. My broader interests include economic sociology, the sociology of science & technology, and a critical theory of nature. Since October 2022, I am an Assistant Professor at the Global and European Studies Institute at the University of Leipzig.
Publications
Publications (21)
The humanities recently rediscovered the category of the ‘planetary’ for a social theory of the Anthropocene critical of the human remaking of the planet. This article brings together Dipesh Chakrabarty's work with Russian planetary and geopolitical thought. Focusing on Vladimir Vernadsky's and Boris Veinberg's research around the Commission for th...
Great claims have been made about the benefits of dematerialization in a digital service economy. However, digitalization has historically increased environmental impacts at local and planetary scales, affecting labor markets, resource use, governance, and power relationships. Here we study the past, present, and future of digitalization through th...
The interwar years saw the rise of debates and comparisons around the growth and efficiency of national power economies. The article interprets this 'energetic productivism' in terms of indirect geopolitical competition. While this form of competition clearly did not rule out national conflicts over resources and territories, it created a new mediu...
More than other energy industries, the electric power industry relied on calculating practices and codifications like load management to handle and develop their technical systems. Scholars have approached these practices largely from the point of view of the history of electricity. While it is true that these practices facilitated the expansion of...
In recent years, there has been a growing interest in the relation between Marxism and the Soviet productivist economy. While historical scholarship rarely explores the intellectual context in which the Soviet experiment unfolded, ecomarxists tend to describe the Soviet Union’s mistaken path as a result of the loss of ‘metabolic’ thinkers following...
The »return of great power competition« between (among others) the US, China, Russia and the EU is a major topic in contemporary public debate. But why do we think of world politics in terms of »competition«? Which information and which rules enable states and other actors in world politics to »compete« with one another? Which competitive strategie...
The »return of great power competition« between (among others) the US, China, Russia and the EU is a major topic in contemporary public debate. But why do we think of world politics in terms of »competition«? Which information and which rules enable states and other actors in world politics to »compete« with one another? Which competitive strategie...
The interwar years saw the rise of debates and comparisons around the growth and efficiency of national power economies. The article interprets this 'energetic productivism' in terms of indirect geopolitical competition. While this form of competition clearly did not rule out national conflicts over resources and territories, it created a new mediu...
The »return of great power competition« between (among others) the US, China, Russia and the EU is a major topic in contemporary public debate. But why do we think of world politics in terms of »competition«? Which information and which rules enable states and other actors in world politics to »compete« with one another? Which competitive strategie...
Seeing Like an Electrical System. The Emergence of the National Power Economy (1880–1930) (in German)
The text ventures into a media history of energy by conceiving of electrical system as discourse networks (Aufschreibesysteme). While the nineteenth century referred to «power sources» that could be tapped locally, the twentieth century began to s...
This contribution explores the political dimension of TechnoScienceSocieties. We assume that technoscientific knowledge production as well as the governance of technoscience is guided by historically contingent rationales. Such rationales have been conceptualized as „sociotechnical imaginaries“ by STS scholars. However, these imaginaries often rema...
The emergence of a field of global energy policy is usually traced back to the events around the 1973–74 oil embargo. This article provides a prehistory to this by tracing the genealogy of the ‘global energy economy’. This genealogy is reconstructed through the lens of the World Power Conference (WPC, today the World Energy Council, WEC), a non-gov...
Der Text ist ein Versuch, die Geschichte der Energiewirtschaft nicht als Technikgeschichte, sondern als Geschichte von Aufschreibesystemen zu schreiben, in der das Signifikat ‚Energiewirtschaft' erst entsteht. Unter der Erforschung von Aufschreibesystemen verstehe ich mit Friedrich Kittler die Frage "was, wo, in wessen Namen und an welche Adresse z...
This contribution explores the political dimension of TechnoScienceSocieties. We assume that technoscientific knowledge production as well as the governance of technoscience is guided by historically contingent, implicit and explicit rationales. Such rationales have been conceptualized as "sociotechnical imaginaries" by STS scholars. However, these...
This article explores the history of the World Energy Council (WEC, formerly World Power Conference and World Energy Conference) between 1924 and 1990 against the backdrop of an emerging field of energy politics. Drawing on the concept of technocratic internationalism, it argues that this international non-governmental organisation exerted influenc...
Recent contributions to a sociological analysis of energy and society focus mostly on its political, economic and technological organization. Yet contrary to other parts of nature, little social scientific attention has been paid to how politics, economics and technology have come to produce and stabilize the concept of energy in the first place an...
Die Diagnosen von Postdemokratie und Verwissenschaftlichung der Politik treffen sich in ihrer Krisendiagnose der modernen Demokratie: Politische Entscheidungen würden zunehmend von Experten und Wissenschaftlern oder gar von unpersönlichen „decision technologies“ (Porter, 2006) getroffen. Der vorliegende Beitrag untersucht die Darstellung politische...
Was haben die „soziale Verantwortung“ von Unternehmen (Corporate Social Responsibility), zunehmende Demokratisierungstendenzen (Responsive Representation) und die Postulierung wissenschaftlicher und gesellschaftlicher „Großprobleme“ (Grand Challenges) gemeinsam? Es handelt sich um Phänomene, die einerseits innerhalb der ausdifferenzierten Sphären v...
This paper tries to explain the success of secondary currencies. Success is defined as the degree to which the initiators of these currencies manage to reach their original goals. In order to do so, we draw on two independent variables to: First, the motivation of a currency’s founder measured by ecological sustainability, strengthening of the soci...
Projects
Projects (3)
In the Soviet Union, nature, politics, and economics related to each other in part through the doctrine of energetics [energetika]. As an ecology, energetics maintained that nature had a known, productive purpose and that this purpose coincided with socialist economic activities. Although obscure and discredited today, energetics in many ways fuelled the economic and ecological policies of the Soviet bloc through much of the twentieth century. This post-doctoral project seeks to understand the emergence, institutionalization and disintegration of Soviet energetics as a planning doctrine from 1917-1991. My research tries to unravel how political power, technology, and science come together to form a non-capitalist productivism. By doing so, my research will contribute to a deeper understanding of the connection between productivism and ecological thought.
Following scientific, economic and engineering practices from the steam economy, to the oil crises and energy development politics (1830-1980), this project explores how we came to know ‘working nature’ and how we changed the world by employing it. Emphasizing the resistance of nature to knowledge claims, the research zooms in on the moments when the handling of coal, electricity, and energy was experimental, when knowledge became established, and when it failed. The project seeks to show how, beneath the laws of thermodynamics, our understanding of energy is mired in the practice of how we strive, succeed, and fail to put nature to work. Working Nature offers not only a genealogy of the energy economy, but a rich historical analysis of the appropriation and resistance of nature.
