The grit in the oyster: care and friction in everyday energy practices Christopher Groves, Karen Henwood, Catherine Butler, Karen Parkhill, Nick Pidgeon and Fiona Shirani

Energy Biographies Project (http://energybiographies.org)

School of Social SciencesCardiff University, UKhttp://cardiff.academia.edu/ChristopherGroves

Energy transitions and imaginaries of ‘smartness’

• Demand reduction as key plank of policy around energy ‘trilemma’

• Smartness seen as defining central trajectory of technological evolution

• Based on particular understandings of subjectivity: social change driven by individual behaviour change

• An increase in rationality: ‘resource men’ (Strengers)

Questioning

smartness

• Do imaginaries of smartness embody viable & desirable futures?

• Technological-behavioural solutions are problematic – practices condition/become entangled with subjectivity (e.g. freezers and microwaves)1,2

• Critique of imaginaries key to answering questions of viability & desirability

• Embodies a responsible research and innovation (RRI) approach

• RRI means reflecting, not on costs vs benefits of transitions, but the social constitutions3 & ‘worlds’4 implied by socio-technical options

1. Shove, E. and D. Southerton (2000). "Defrosting the Freezer: From Novelty to Convenience: A Narrative of Normalization." Journal of Material Culture 5(3): 301-319.

2. Ozaki, R. and I. Shaw (2014). "Entangled Practices: Governance, Sustainable Technologies, and Energy Consumption." Sociology 48(3): 590-605.3. Kearnes, M., et al. (2006). "From Bio to Nano: Learning Lessons from the UK Agricultural Biotechnology Controversy." Science as Culture 15(4): 291-

307.4. Macnaghten, P. and B. Szerszynski (2013). "Living the global social experiment: An analysis of public discourse on solar radiation management and its

implications for governance." Global Environmental Change 23(2): 465-474.

Methodological issues• RRI approaches tend to emphasise processes of discursive

deliberation – Habermasian technological democracy• But participatory assessment of viability/desirability

requires approaches that explore lived engagements with technologies1

• Reflexivity towards phenomena not just cognitive; also rooted in affective, embodied subjectivity2

• Ethnographic work on ‘smartness’ explores practical entanglements in the lifeworld3

• Energy Biographies adds to this a narrative, biographical approach which explores the role of engagement with technology in shaping identity4,5

1. Mol, A. (2008). The logic of care. London. New York, Routledge.2. Lash, S. and J. Urry (1994). Economies of Signs and Space. London, Sage.3. Strengers, Y. (2013). Smart Energy Technologies in Everyday Life: Smart Utopia? London, Palgrave Macmillan.4. Groves, C., et al. (2015). "Energy biographies: narrative genres, lifecourse transitions and practice change." Science, Technology & Human Values. DOI:

10.1177/01622439156091165. Groves, C., et al. (2015). "Invested in unsustainability? On the psychosocial patterning of engagement in practices." Environmental Values 24(6).

The Energy Biographies project (2011 – present)

• QL biographical interviews▫ Four UK sites: Ely,

Peterston (Cardiff), Lammas (west Wales), Royal Free Hospital [RFH] (London)

▫ 3 longitudinal interviews (N=74 in first round, N=36 for rounds 2 & 3)

▫ 6 months between interviews

Lammas, West Wales

Royal Free Hospital,

LondonPeterston, Cardiff

Ely, Cardiff

Multimodal component•2nd and 3rd round

interviews▫Photographing everyday

energy use with smartphone

▫Using two films to explore socio-technical imaginaries of smartness Monsanto’s ‘House of the

Future’ (1957) UK Channel 4 ‘Home of

the future’ (2012)

Energy use, attachment and identity• Our analysis of data shows

how energy use is bound up with attachment, identity and agency1,2

• Practices not just instrumental, but also constitutive of a sense of what matters

• Biographical experiences of how energy is used shape reflection on future imaginaries and the socio-technical worlds contained within them

1. Groves, C., et al. (2015). "Energy biographies: narrative genres, lifecourse transitions and practice change." Science, Technology & Human Values. DOI: 10.1177/0162243915609116

2. Groves, C., et al. (2015). "Invested in unsustainability? On the psychosocial patterning of engagement in practices." Environmental Values 24(6).

“Cos we love being outside, we just love that you can you know go, we were sitting out there one evening … it was like midnight and you could have a drink outside still and it’s so lovely here cos it’s so quiet and everything so but you wouldn’t have been able to do it without that […]. So that’s our kind of, we know it’s really bad but we’re still going to use it.”

Interviewee ‘Lucy’ (Peterston), on her family’s patio heaters

Convenience and comfort: memories and ambivalence

• Older interviewees: remember liberating, life-enhancing socio-technical transitions

• But convenience has also become an end-in-itself

• Biographical narratives of a thinned1 lifeworld in which attention is dispersed2

• Films seen as representing/affirming this world

1. Casey, E. S. (2001). "Between Geography and Philosophy: What Does It Mean to Be in the Place-World?" Annals of the Association of American Geographers 91(4): 683-693.

2. Stiegler, B. (2010). Taking care of youth and the generations. Stanford, CA, Stanford University Press.

It’s the best thing in the world that happened to me, was going from coal that we had over in Hywel Dda there. But when I first moved from Cambria Road to Heol Deva that was a house of, it was unbelievable, we had central heating and I was only 10, in all the rooms, a steel house, wonderful, wonderful.

(Jeffrey, 60s, Ely)

‘[…]yeah, everything is really easy and convenient I mean you want the TV on you hit a button and it’s on and you’ve got like 500 channels at your fingertips should you want to watch them and then you’ve got all your music players and you’ve got not just one but maybe one in each room […] and then you’ve got, you’ve got Wi-Fi and internet and stuff ‘

(Monica, RFH)

Other memories: ‘friction’, and valued subjectivity

• Biographical narratives of embodied engagement in embodied practices involving ‘focal objects’1

• Associated with valued forms of relational subjectivity2

• ‘Friction’ as individuating3

“Yeah but I don’t like that. I look back and I think actually I see for me how I had no connection with it [central heating], no connection you know, whereas when the wood’s there and you see the fire going you think maybe I’ll just turn the fire down cos the pile of wood is shrinking.”

(Emmanuelle, Lammas)

“I think we were saying about the log fire, it’s rewarding when you sit back and see the log fire whereas if you just flick a switch and it’s there it’s not as rewarding so who knows you know on how it effects our happiness in the long run things like that, don’t know.”

(Sarah, RFH)

“Yeah well that’s, my partner says I’m obsessed with it because I’m always off up the woods looking for wood and things like that, ‘I’m going to light it tonight’, ‘oh no you’re not are you?’”

(Robert, Peterston)

1. Borgmann, A. (1993). Crossing the Postmodern Divide. Chicago, University of Chicago Press.2. Groenhout, R. E. (2004). Connected Lives: Human Nature and an Ethics of Care. Lanham, MD,

Rowman & Littlefield.3. Stiegler, B. (2010). Taking care of youth and the generations. Stanford, CA, Stanford University Press.

Mobilising critical reflection• Reflecting on valued forms of

agency and links to practices/technologies spotlights values like comfort and convenience1

• In some cases, leads to a re-imagining of the meaning of these values

1. Vannini, P. and J. Taggart (2014). Off the Grid: Re-Assembling Domestic Life. London, Routledge.

• Participants reflected critically on the films’ imaginaries of smartness

• Key themes: imposition of fragility and erosion of agency

“I had no connection with it [central heating], no connection you know, whereas when the wood’s there and you see the fire going you think maybe I’ll just turn the fire down cos the pile of wood is shrinking.”

(Emmanuelle, Lammas)

“[talking about Ch4 film] all the gadgets I mean that was you know similar to the bloody [Monsanto] house you know you’re hungry and the electricity is down and you can’t, you know you can’t have a shower because you can’t turn on the tap (Vanessa, Lammas)”

(Vanessa, Lammas)

“I still think it sort of dumbs us down as a kind of society and replaces our you know ingenuity and our thinking, free thinking with controlled you know thinking and you know computerisation of everything”

(Dennis, RFH)

In conclusion•This reflexivity is aesthetic, embodied,

relational•Indicates value of multimodal-narrative-

biographical approach for RRI•This elicits biographical reflections on

embodied engagements with technologies, productive for critical examination of imaginaries

•Opens paths for extending deliberative approaches beyond ‘Habermasian technological democracy’

Thank you

http://energybiographies.org

Other team Members: Professor Karen Henwood, Professor Nick Pidgeon& Dr Fiona Shirani (Cardiff), Dr Karen Parkhill (now York)Dr Catherine Butler (now Exeter)