This article brings together two growing literatures – on sociotechnical imaginaries in science and technology studies and on resource materialities in anthropology – to explore how two energy-producing communities in the American West understand the moral salience of energy systems and the place of labor within them. Studies of energy sociotechnical imaginaries overwhelmingly focus on the role that state and transnational actors play in shaping perceptions of the ‘good society’, rather than how these imaginaries inform and are transformed in the lived experience of everyday people. We illuminate the contested dimension of sociotechnical imaginaries and their positioning within structures of power that inform visions of moral behavior and social order. Whereas the role of energy in national imaginaries is grounded almost entirely in the consumption it enables, examining the everyday ethics of people who live and work in Colorado’s uranium-rich Western Slope and Wyoming’s coal-rich Powder River Basin reveals an insistence that ‘good’ energy systems also provide opportunities for dignified and well-paid blue-collar work. This imaginary, we argue, remains ‘bounded’ at a local scale rather than circulating more widely to gain national or international traction. Theorizing this boundedness illustrates not only the contested nature of sociotechnical imaginaries, but also the constraints that material assemblages and sediments of the past place on imagined futures.

Though engineering is often perceived as a pathway of upward mobility in the United States, very little is known about the experiences of undergraduate engineering students who come from low-income backgrounds or are the first in their families to attend college. The little research that does exist on low-income, first-generation (LIFG) engineering students is grounded in a deficiency perspective that emphasizes the barriers these students face: greater feelings of financial pressure and curriculum overload, along with lower family support, confidence in technical skill sets, satisfaction with instructors and satisfaction with the overall college experience. Our ethnographic research with LIFG students at a public engineering university and community college reveals that these barriers can create a sense of belonging uncertainty for them as engineering students. Yet our students were also able to draw on the funds of knowledge they acquired growing up in poor families and, when these funds of knowledge are validated, they establish a sense of belonging in engineering education and the profession.

Growing anthropological research on energy provides critical explorations into the cross‐cultural ways in which people perceive and use this fundamental resource. We argue that two dominant frameworks animate that literature: a critique of corporate and state power, and advocacy for energy transitions to less carbon‐intensive futures. These frameworks have narrowed the ethical questions and perspectives that the discipline has considered in relation to energy. This is because they are animated by judgements that can implicitly shape research agendas or sometimes result in strong accusations that obscure how our interlocutors themselves may consider the rightness and wrongness of energy resources and the societal infrastructures of which they form a part. We propose a more capacious approach to studying energy ethics that opens up energy dilemmas to ethnographic inquiry. As such, we show how energy dilemmas constitute important sites for the generation of anthropological knowledge, encouraging more insightful and inclusive discussions of the place of energy in human and more‐than‐human lives.

Rather than existing a priori, the underground comes to be through interlinked political, economic, cultural, and technoscientific practices and processes. Underlying each of these are issues of knowledge, expertise and power that STS is uniquely positioned to explore. In this thematic collection, our focus on the underground draws attention to the work, knowledge, and placemaking activities of those engaged in mining and energy development. We focus on how questions about extraction and burial are posed and deliberated through maps and models. More generally, we highlight the contributions of STS Underground, a network that in its nascent stage is helping to connect the many STS scholars who seek to use the underground as a source, site, and symbol for thinking of the future of the field, as well as their personal interventions as engaged scholars.