ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Wires Across Borders: Transnational Perspectives on Electrical Histories

Session Submission Type: Organized Session

English Abstract

Histories of electrification have often centered on national expertise and large-scale systems, framing electrical networks as pillars of modern state formation (Nye 1990; Meiton 2018; Montaño 2021; Mohsin 2023). Other scholarship, however, emphasizes heterogeneous infrastructures and local contingencies (Winther 2008; Sarkar 2020). This panel advances a transnational perspective, foregrounding the entangled technological, commercial, and cultural processes that shaped electricity’s transfer across borders.

Spanning Mexico, Spain, Chile, the UK, Trinidad & Tobago, Indonesia, Ghana, and the Pacific Northwest, the papers trace electrification’s diverse trajectories. They examine domestic electrification mediated by women’s associations and global dialogues, maintenance practices revealed through visual media, Chile’s evolving energy policy and early electrification, and the interplay of faith and nationalism in Spain’s engineering networks. Other contributions explore the politics of outages in Ghana and the U.S. and hydroelectric projects in Mexico, where foreign capital and dispossession reshaped landscapes. Across these cases, the panel investigates how engineers, policymakers, maintainers, and consumers negotiated expertise, adapted imported technologies, and balanced competing priorities, illuminating the circulation of ideas, tools, and personnel as well as tensions between aspiration and limitation.

Beyond technical systems, the panel highlights gendered expertise and civic engagement, faith and cultural narratives, and the everyday politics of crisis and blame. It also considers methodological innovation, from archival research to Instagram as a source for tacit maintenance knowledge. By situating local histories within global flows, these studies reveal electrification as contingent, contested, and deeply embedded in imaginaries of modernity offering fresh insights into the uneven geographies of electrical power.

Sub Unit

• Organized Session

Chairs

• Diana J. Montaño, Washington University in St. Louis

• Anto Mohsin, Northwestern University in Qatar

Commentator

• Darina Martykanova, Autonomous University of Madrid

Individual Presentations

• Domestic energy usage in trans-national context: a global reading of the women’s magazine The Electrical Age (1924-1986) - Graeme Gooday, University of Leeds

• Epistemic Images: Instagram as a Source for Maintenance Knowledge - Anto Mohsin, Northwestern University in Qatar

• Chile's electrified energy policy (1935 to 2024) - Cecilia Ibarra, Universidad de Chile

• A Jesuit Engineer in a Wired World: Faith, Electricity, and the Transnational Making of Spanish Power, 1910s–1920s - Daniel Pérez-Zapico, Autonomous University of Madrid

• Early electrification of Chile: between transnational interests and sociotechnical imaginaries (1879 - 1896) - José Soto Vejar, King’s College London

• Transnational Outages: Power, Blame, and Everyday Politics in the Pacific Northwest and Ghana - Veronica Jacome, Temple University

• The Transnational Flows that Made Necaxa - Diana J. Montaño, Washington University in St. Louis

Session Organizers

• Anto Mohsin, Northwestern University in Qatar

• Graeme Gooday, University of Leeds

• Cecilia Ibarra, Universidad de Chile

• Daniel Pérez-Zapico, Autonomous University of Madrid