Gökçe Günel is Associate Professor in Anthropology at Rice University. Her research investigates how infrastructure transforms amid energy and climate change-related challenges. Her first book, Spaceship in the Desert: Energy, Climate Change and Urban Design in Abu Dhabi (Duke University Press, 2019), focuses on the construction of renewable energy and clean technology infrastructures in the United Arab Emirates, with a specific emphasis on the Masdar City project. Her second book, Floating Power: Energy, Infrastructure, and South-South Relations (Duke University Press, 2026), examines the emergence of a Turkish-built floating power plant in Ghana, analyzing how such inventive infrastructure shapes South-South relations and embodies broader imaginations of energy futures.
Dr. Günel finished her PhD in Anthropology at Cornell and has served as Cultures of Energy Mellon-Sawyer Postdoctoral Fellow at Rice University (2012-2013), ACLS New Faculty Fellow and Lecturer at Columbia University (2013-2016), and Assistant Professor in Middle East and North African Studies at the University of Arizona (2016-2019). Her articles have been published in Limn, Ephemera, Engineering Studies, Public Culture, Anthropological Quarterly, The Yearbook of Comparative Literature, The ARPA Journal, Avery Review, PoLAR, Log, e-flux, Perspecta, South Atlantic Quarterly, and Environment and Planning D: Society and Space. She has contributed to edited volumes, such as Climates: Architecture and the Planetary Imaginary (Lars Müller, 2016), Anthropocene Unseen: A Lexicon (Punctum Press, 2019), The New Arab Urban: Gulf Cities of Wealth, Ambition, and Distress (NYU Press, 2019), Frontier Assemblages (Wiley, 2019) and Extinct: A Compendium of Obsolete Objects (Reaktion Books, 2021).
Dr. Günel is one of the editors of Limn and has most recently co-edited Limn 11—The Obsolescence Issue.
Dr. Günel co-authored "A Manifesto for Patchwork Ethnography" (2020) and co-leads Patchwork Ethnography. The book Patchwork Ethnography is forthcoming with the University of Chicago Press in 2026.