Alexander Wentland is currently a PhD student in the “Innovation society today” graduate program at the Technical University of Berlin. His dissertation deals with different aspects and dimensions of technological futures imagined for the electrification of transportation. Due to his background and personal interests in innovation studies and STS, he is also affiliated with the “Science Policy Group” at the Berlin Social Science Center (WZB).

While a visiting research fellow in the STS Program at the Kennedy School, Alexander will gather data and carry out fieldwork for the US-part of his comparison between the electric mobility discourse in Germany and the United States. The heuristic framework of socio-technical imagination serves as the starting point for his analysis in which he intends to explore the co-production of dominant and marginalized types of “electrification futures” and the respective views and assumptions about technology, social values, and modernity at large associated with them. In his doctoral thesis, he argues that the dominant envisioning of electric cars has shifted from a mere substitute for conventional vehicles to a much broader narrative that encompasses, and re-imagines, central domains of life such as living, work, leisure, and mobility.

Alexander received a German “Magister Artium” degree in political science, sociology, and philosophy at the Technical University of Dresden in Germany as well as a master’s degree in sociology at the New School for Social Research in New York City. Since then, he has been working as a research fellow at the Berlin Social Science Center (WZB) on various topics including the governance of innovation, science-industry relations in the life sciences as well as the emergence of synthetic biology as a new academic discipline.