Marten Boekelo is a political anthropologist with a particular interest in questions of citizenship. Energy citizenship comes to the fore in wide range of everyday and extraordinary sites: from how people engage with devices and machines in and around the house, which can both confirm and frustrate their imagined relationship to the world, to the opportunities they get to reflect and decide about how energy is provided, whether it’s in their town or country. A key question for successful transitions: through which engagements do people get the sense they are able to shape their future?

Marten has Master’s degrees in philosophy (Catholic University of Leuven), anthropology (VU University Amsterdam) and social sciences (University of Chicago). He wrote a PhD thesis about repertoires of citizenship in Beirut (University of Amsterdam) and conducted postdoctoral research about users’ experiences with, and deliberations about, a virtual power plan in Amsterdam (Wageningen University). He taught at various universities in the Netherlands, not in least about qualitative research methods. He writes a bi-weekly newsletter popularizing the latest social science insights into the transition towards clean energy called The Social Life of Energy.