DescriptionOver the coming decades, it is likely that many places around the United States and around the world will be transformed by new efforts to produce unconventional fossil fuels. Before this development is fully underway, it is important to better evaluate how these technologies are grounded in the character of particular regions. This study sets out to gain a foothold into the ways that new unconventional energy projects and particular places are co-shaping one another. I argue that this objective can be realized by engaging and deepening dialogue between research on socio-technical transitions and research on the community experience and regional economic geographies of resource and industrial development. The overarching research questions here are: How are niche projects and regime dynamics shaped by local context. In turn how are local conditions shaped by energy projects? How do they co-evolve as socio-technical projects? I examine these questions through a case study of shale gas development in northeastern Pennsylvania, which is a new place of energy development that is only recently gaining research attention. A main objective of this dissertation is to address the need to better understand transitions by investigating interactions between shale energy technologies and northeastern Pennsylvania as a region and place. The dissertation first analyzes the history and geographic patterning of the shale mode of producing energy, highlighting the way major shale operators deploy business models and technologies that one local development official characterized as "itinerant factories." This term underscores the pace and scale of an extraction campaign, the impulse to standardize development across places, and its migratory volatility. Over five years, northeastern Pennsylvania experienced this migratory volatility as a drilling boom followed by a significant downturn in activity. The second part of this dissertation analyzes data collected through two rounds of interviews with local participants in northeastern Pennsylvania. Evidence assembled from interviews documents social perspectives on the shale gas regime, place transformation, economic development, and the challenges of governance. The research supports the proposition that making sense of energy transitions locally can be improved by linking research on socio-technical transitions with research on the community experience of energy development.