just a container for the 5 strands
Energy and net zero transitions depend on meaningful public engagement. How society engages with these issues is undergoing significant changes. In response, the Public Engagement Observatory of the UK Energy Research Centre has launched a new call for evidence on interesting or significant cases of public engagement with energy and climate change.
In exploring novel ways of accounting for diverse public engagements with energy, climate change, and net zero on an ongoing basis, the UKERC Public Engagement Observatory, based in the 3S Research Group, Our Climate Engagements: The Observatory’s new crowdsourcing capabilityis currently piloting novel crowdsourcing approaches where stakeholders and citizens are directly involved in mapping public…
3S researcher Martin Mahony has received funding from the Arts & Humanities Research Council to work with colleagues in the UK and the Caribbean to shed new light on the volcanic geoheritage of the Caribbean island of Montserrat. The project, titled ‘Archives Assemble! Activating the Archives to Collaboratively Reimagine Volcanic Geoheritage’, brings together researchers from three UK…
The Public Engagement Laboratory for Nature and Society experiments with new ways of mapping, practicing, learning about, and responding to diverse public engagements with nature and biodiversity, within Natural England and its networks in the UK and internationally. Public Engagement Laboratory is a partnership between researchers in the 3S Research Group and Natural England – the…
3S researcher Martin Mahony is due to speak on 26th November 2024 at the Biannual Geneva Environmental Lectures series which brings together leading scholars from across the social sciences and humanities explore the interplay of knowledge, nature, and governance. Through his talk entitled “Science in a crisis: Networks, hierarchies and colonial continuities in responses to volcanic crises”, Martin…
Addressing climate change and realising net zero demands long-term systemic changes and the meaningful engagement of society. However, most existing approaches to public engagement focus on communicating to the public or inviting publics to engage in discrete one-off processes – such as behaviour change initiatives, attitude surveys, and deliberative processes – in specific parts of…
Nickhil Sharma, a 3S PhD Student, has recently completed some pioneering work with UK Power Networks (UKPN) where he introduced intersectionality as both a critical theory for reflection and a methodological tool. UKPN, who are responsible for elecricity networks across London, the South East, and East Anglia were encouraged to adopt the lens of intersectionality…
3S members have contributed to the recently-released Elgar Encyclopedia of Science and Technology Studies. Edited by Ulrike Felt and Alan Irwin, the volume offers a comprehensive overview of the field of STS through short, accessible chapters on the field’s key frameworks, themes, and topics. It is intended to act as a guide to STS for newcomers and students, as well as to help more senior researchers keep apace with this rapidly expanding and impactful field of research.
Moving beyond mainstream ‘residual realist’ perspectives of participation as discrete, specific and pre-given, constructivist STS scholarship sees participation, publics and public issues as co-produced through the performance of collective practices that interrelate in wider systems. Work on remaking participation in STS, and specifically within UKERC’s Public Engagement Observatory, has developed the theoretical basis for an…
Universities are increasingly being challenged to show leadership in responding to and addressing climate change. Staff, students and the wider UEA community are already attempting to address some of these challenges on their own terms. However, universities have wider untapped potential to move beyond a siloed approach to decision-making and address the many social and…
Prof Jason Chilvers (3S Chair; UKERC Co-Director and Observatory Lead) and Dr Phedeas Stephanides (Senior Researcher) have published a new briefing reporting on the findings of a collaborative experiment with partners from the Climate Citizens Project at Lancaster University, the Climate Change Committee, and Shared Future CIC on public engagement with home energy decarbonisation. This experiment in evaluating a citizens’ panel on…
Through a series of collaborative experiments with partners, the UK Energy Research Centre’s (UKERC) Public Engagement Observatory, based in the 3S Research Group, is actively exploring how new approaches to mapping diverse forms of public engagement across systems can make a difference in practice to energy and climate-related decisions, innovations and new forms of participation.…
The UKERC Public Engagement Observatory, based in the 3S Research Group, maps the many different ways that people are engaging with energy, climate change and net zero on an ongoing basis. In this webinar, taking place on Monday 11th September 2023, 2-3pm, the Observatory team will present the findings of a major new analysis of…
3S researchers Jason Chilvers, Phedeas Stephanides, Helen Pallett, and Tom Hargreaves have just published a new UKERC Public Engagement Observatory briefing note presenting the findings of a major new analysis of public engagement with energy, climate change, and net zero occurring in the UK between 2015-2022. The study used the comparative case analysis method developed by the…
3S researchers Nickhil Sharma, Tom Hargreaves and Helen Pallett have a new Open Access article published in the journal Buildings and Cities on ‘Social justice implications of smart urban technologies: an intersectional approach’. The article demonstrates how, despite claims that ‘smart urban technologies’ will solve multiple urban crises, narratives around ‘smart urbanism’ (SU) often end up reinforcing and deepening existing inequalities by prioritizing market interests and data monetization over the rights and interests of marginalised groups. The article calls for a comprehensive analysis of social justice concerns in SU and develops a novel intersectional approach for doing so. It uses this approach to map and analyse 70 cases of opposition, alternatives, and glitches with smart urban technologies from around the world.
Join us on Tuesday 5th July 2022, from 2pm to 3pm, on a webinar marking the launch of the new dedicated website and open access database of UKERC’s Public Engagement Observatory that is based in the 3S Research Group.
New funding announced today will see our 3S Research Group become a core part of the new five-year phase of the UK Energy Research Centre (UKERC). As part of this significant investment 3S will establish and house the first ever national observatory for societal engagement with energy and net zero transitions, which is a new core…
I am a 1+3 PhD student in the Centre for Climate Change and Social Transformations (CAST) and in the Science, Society & Sustainability (3S) Research Group. My research explores UK climate change governance, specifically the role of the UK Committee on Climate Change (CCC) in shaping the wider knowledge and governance landscapes in which specific…
UK Parliament announced in a press release today that Professor Jason Chilvers of 3S has been appointed to serve on the Academic Panel advising Climate Assembly UK. Climate Assembly UK is the UK’s first nationwide citizens’ assembly on climate change. It was commissioned by six cross-party House of Commons Select Committees in summer 2019 in…
3S Chair Jason Chilvers and Jan-Peter Voß (Berlin University of Technology) are advertising a Call for Papers for an open panel on “Democracy in the making” to be held at the 4S/EASST conference in Prague, 18-21 August 2020. They invite submissions which reconstruct how ‘the demos’ is enacted in practice and how this is supported by…
‘Just Public Algorithms’ is a project funded by Not Equal EPSRC Network+: Social Justice through the Digital Economy. It ran September 2019 – April 2020. The project was led by Helen Pallett, supported by Jason Chilvers and Catherine Price in 3S, and Simon Burall at Involve. The main aim of the ‘Just public algorithms’ project…
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:…
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…
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…
Remaking Participation, a book edited by 3S Chair Jason Chilvers and Matthew Kearnes (UNSW, Sydney), has received the European Association for the Study of Science and Technology (EASST) 2018 Amsterdamska Award. The award, in honour of science and technology studies (STS) scholar Olga Amsterdamska, is made for a “significant creative collaboration in an edited book or special issue…
3S member Martin Mahony, who is a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow and Lecturer in Human Geography, has published a new working paper based on his work on the history of atmospheric science and technology. It looks at the historical geographies of British imperial air-shipping, and examines what happens when imaginations of technological futures collide with…
3S researchers Jason Chilvers, Helen Pallett and Tom Hargreaves have today launched an important policy briefing calling for a new approach to public engagement with energy. The UK Energy Research Centre briefing – entitled ‘Public engagement with energy: broadening evidence, policy and practice’ – translates findings from our Remaking Energy Participation project to policy-makers…
In this British Academy-funded project 3S lecturer Martin Mahony is investigating the intersections of science, empire and climate in order to understand how practices of predicting and observing the weather were shaped by the context of British colonialism. Relationships between science and empire have been well documented in a burgeoning field concerned with the histories and…
A growing body of scholarship suggests that capitalism is not inevitable and that moments of crisis provide an opportunity for critique and social transformation towards sustainability. Yet literature on social movements employing direct-action tactics to unmake capitalism and challenge austerity in the wake of the ongoing economic crisis is still lacking. It has neither adequately…
Deliberate large-scale interventions in the Earth’s climate system known as ‘geoengineering’ have been proposed in order to moderate anthropogenic climate change. This PhD research critically reviewed existing appraisals of geoengineering before developing and executing its own appraisal method in response to their limitations. The research developed an innovative multicriteria method called deliberative mapping to ‘open…
‘Citizen science’ can place citizens at the centre of a process that generates new knowledge for disaster risk reduction. This project, funded under the Research Councils UK Global Challenges Research Fund, aims to understand how citizen science is currently applied to disaster risk reduction (DRR) objectives in the face of natural hazards, and how it might be more…
Large concentrations of jellyfish are increasingly being recorded worldwide. The main drivers of this are hypothesised to be as a result of increasing ocean temperatures and increases in prey availability. These factors are often influenced by anthropogenic activities that alter the characteristics of the oceans in favour of gelatinous zooplankton. The impacts of a bloomed…
Many communities along the Norfolk coast have historically, and more recently, seen changes to their landscapes. Significant changes are likely in the future, especially in areas where coastal erosion is evident. The way these changes are communicated and the level of community engagement in the decision making process on how to deal with current and…
Social practice theory is a relatively young field of scholarship in social science and has a lot to offer in terms of describing the actions of individuals and communities – particularly with regards to mundane situations or everyday live. To date there has not been a lot of work done on the governance of practices…
Research on local organic food systems by 3S’s Dr Gill Seyfang (Reader in Sustainable Consumption) is a ‘Classic Paper’ in the field of Sustainable Development. Dr Seyfang’s work is the 5th most-highly cited paper on Sustainable Development that was published in 2006. This is according to Google Scholar, whose ‘Classic Papers’ highlight the ten most-cited…
Role playing is increasingly used in European Studies and political science more generally to foster students understanding of social science theories. Yet in most cases, role playing is only done by students. Not so in Theoretical Theatre, a teaching innovation which puts the onus on teachers to act. In our performances, teachers embody competing theories…
The 3rd seminar in the ‘Nuclear futures: re-making sociotechnical research agendas’ interdisciplinary seminar series will be held at UEA on 9th-10th January 2017. Its title is ‘Publics and participation in radioactive waste management’.
This paper presents and tests a new conceptual framework for understanding sustainable transitions in sociotechnical systems. We apply this in the first ever study of sustainable transitions in the UK retail banking system which has suffered recently from banking crises, and links to environmentally-sensitive industries such as fossil fuels. Sustainability-focused values-based banks are a potential…