Antti Silvast

Biography

Antti Silvast is a researcher at the Department of Interdisciplinary Studies of Culture at NTNU, working in the NTNU Energy Transition Initiative. I received my doctoral degree from Sociology at the University of Helsinki (Finland) in 2013. This research was published as a scientific monograph by Routledge in 2017, titled as Making Electricity Resilient: Risk and Security in a Liberalized Infrastructure. It develops a multi-sited analysis of the electricity infrastructure in Finland and Scandinavia, focusing on risk management and markets, and spanning from international energy exchanges and public regulations to energy control rooms and households. The work mainly draws upon interdisciplinary Science and Technology Studies (STS) perspectives. After my defence, I held a postdoctoral position in Princeton University, in PIIRS Global Systemic Risk, a multidisciplinary research community dedicated to studying large-scale threats facing our globalized world. I then received a 3-year fellowship at the University of Edinburgh (UK), Science, Technology and Innovation Studies, where I among others was a Co-Investigator in Checking Assumptions aND promoting responsibility in smart Development projects (CANDID), funded by the European Commission Horizon 2020, and working with Robin Williams, Charles Raab (Edinburgh), and Kjetil Rommetveit (Bergen University). I was also brought in to be a postdoctoral researcher at Durham University (UK), Department of Anthropology, to the National Centre for Energy Systems Integration (CESI), which integrates energy experts from various academic disciplines to understand future supply and demand. My collaboration there with Simone Abram (Durham) developed ethnographic methods to study energy systems modelling and scenarios, and integrated energy network management in control rooms. I serve as an editor of Science & Technology Studies, the official journal of the European Association for the Study of Science and Technology (EASST). I also am a member of the editorial team of the Nordic Journal of Science and Technology Studies, which is published at NTNU.