3S’s Tom Hargreaves recently spoke at a major industry conference on the Future of Utilities: Smart Energy 2019. Across two days, the conference explored the range of ways that smarter technologies and approaches might change the UK energy system. Tom Hargreaves’ presentation focussed on the challenges householders face when engaging with smart home technologies. This drew…
‘Just Public Algorithms’ is a project funded by Not Equal EPSRC Network+: Social Justice through the Digital Economy. It will run September 2019 – April 2020. The project is led by Helen Pallett, supported by Jason Chilvers and Simon Burall at Involve. The main aim of the ‘Just public algorithms’ project is to design an…
I am a PhD student in the Science, Society & Sustainability (3S) Research Group. I’m interested in the role environmental sciences play in the relations between science and society. My PhD seeks to uncover a history of environmental science, using The School of Environmental Sciences at UEA as a case-study. Broadly, my research interests include;…
3S members Tom Hargreaves and Noel Longhurst have published a new working paper based on their research into fuel poverty and emotions. The paper argues that dominant policy understandings of fuel poverty tend to overlook its lived experience, resulting in narrow, overly technical problem framings and solutions. The authors explore a range of emotional engagements with…
A blog post by 3S PhD student Sara Skarp reflecting on her trips to several academic conferences this summer. “Climate change is a lost battle”, human ecologist Alf Hornborg said. The people in the audience at the Degrowth conference seemed shocked, but I suspect that he was echoing secret fears. Is this what we are…
I have always had an interest in environmental issues, I’m told in fact that I used to make and put up anti-whaling posters in primary school. That interest has broadened over the years to include policy and social issues but the core has remained the same. What was probably mostly youthful exuberance has grown up,…
Senior Researcher in the Norwich Business School I am an environmental social scientist conducting interdisciplinary, critically-constructive research around societal engagement with sustainability. I am especially interested in: (a) radical grassroots innovation movements, (b) socio-technical transitions in addressing sustainability challenges, and (c) the mundane and distributed engagements with the sustainability agenda in everyday life. Having recently…
Sociologist and Senior Researcher on the FAB-GGR project. My research falls between science and technology studies (STS), digital social research and participation. I joined the 3S group in July 2018 as a full-time researcher on FAB-GGR (funded by NERC), a project assessing the feasibility of large-scale greenhouse gas removal from bioenergy with carbon capture and…
The enduring significance of the sciences of environmental change, and their impact global politics, has increasingly attracted the attention of historians of science (Edwards 2010; Howe 2014). Yet the definition of ‘environmental science’ is often taken for granted. In the post-war period the idea of ‘the environment’, and of a distinctive ‘environmental science’, began to…
3S researchers Tom Hargreaves and Noel Longhurst led a research programme in this 2-year (2016-2018) UK Energy Research Centre funded research project, based in UEA’s Centre for Competition Policy, which explored Equity and Justice in Energy Markets. As a whole, the research project was multi-disciplinary, drawing together research teams from a range of disciplines including:…
The challenge of managing and reducing domestic waste is a growing sustainability problem for governments and Local Authorities. This project investigates the inter-relationships between domestic waste systems, everyday social practices, and householders’ waste reduction and recycling activities. It will make a major contribution to reconceptualising domestic waste activities and thus help to design and implement…
FAB-GGR is an interdisciplinary project that aims to better understand the real-world feasibility and consequences of large-scale afforestation and biomass energy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS) approaches to greenhouse gas removal (GGR). As part of FAB-GGR, 3S researchers – Jason Chilvers, Laurie Waller, Irene Lorenzoni – are studying the social and political feasibility of developing afforestation and…
