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Join us for this seminar from Next Generation Visiting Researcher Dr Liza Rose Cirolia (University of Cape Town), hosted by the Cabot Institute Low Carbon Energy theme. 

This seminar is open to all UoB staff and students.

Over the past decade, the Turkish company Karpowership has exponentially expanded its operations in Africa. Starting in Ghana with just one ship (Günel, 2022), today there are a dozen “powerships” moored along the continent’s coasts, feeding electricity into utility networks. Notwithstanding important scholarly and activist concerns over the company’s costly contracts, hazardous fuel choices, and corrupt business practices, decision-makers often present Karpowership as “a necessary evil” on the long road to greener and more secure energy. 

In this paper, we argue that powerships offer a unique entry point into the contested and protracted moral worlds that animate infrastructural transitions (Oguz & Goodale, 2024). To address this, we assembled an archive on the use of these ships in Africa and undertook three detailed case studies: Sierra Leone, The Gambia, and South Africa (the latter planned but never materialized). Using both primary and secondary sources, we make two core arguments. First, we show that powerships are not only justified on technical terms but also through moral registers. These techno-moral discourses (and related negotiation strategies) engage critically with energy poverty, infrastructural lock-in, and the injustices of the energy transition. Second, powership deployment is integrally linked to African utilities’ commitment (albeit with limited resources) to the maintaining the centralized electricity grid. To this effect, powership deployment forms part of electrical hybridity as a mode of development (Jaglin et al., 2024), supporting (rather than eroding) imaginaries of both the network and state power. In closing we call for an ambivalent view of powerships.

About the speaker:

Liza is an Associate Professor at the African Centre for Cities (ACC). Her work focuses on the relationship between hybrid infrastructures and governance, with a specific interest in technological transitions, urban statecraft, and fiscal assemblages. She is committed to collaborative research, southern networks, and applied scholarship. She teaches two core courses as part of the ACC' 's Master in Sustainable Urban Practice (MSUP). She regularly advises local and national governments on urban policy issues. She is a corresponding editor for Urban Studies, Finance and Space, and Platforms & Society

Liza is visiting Bristol as a 'Next Generation' Visiting Professor from 25 May to 1 July.