Southwest Humanities is extremely proud to announce the publication of another excellent book we have indexed. Today, 21 April 2026, Gökçe Günel’s Floating Power: Energy, Infrastructure, and South-South Relations, realeased by Duke University Press. Floating Power is an ethnographically rich and conceptually innovative study of how energy systems are built, expanded, and understood in the contemporary world. Centering on a Turkish-built floating power plant operating off the coast of Ghana, Günel uses this striking case to explore how nations pursue energy security not by replacing old systems with new ones, but by layering multiple forms of energy production—hydroelectric, fossil fuels, and renewables—into ever-expanding infrastructures. In doing so, she challenges the dominant narrative of “energy transition,” arguing instead for a model of “energy accumulation” in which different technologies coexist and grow together rather than sequentially supplanting one another.

Beyond its empirical focus, the book makes a broader theoretical intervention into how scholars understand infrastructure, globalization, and political economy. By tracing the relationships among states, corporations, and transnational actors in what are often termed “South-South” partnerships, Günel reveals how energy projects are entangled with shifting forms of power, inequality, and aspiration. Her analysis also complicates linear or developmentalist views of technological progress, showing how infrastructures are provisional, overlapping, and shaped by uncertainty and deferral. As a result, Floating Power makes a significant contribution to anthropology, science and technology studies, energy humanities, and global studies, offering a new framework for thinking about how energy futures are imagined and materially produced in an interconnected world.

For more information about this important new title, please see the publisher’s website here.