Members of 3S have put forward a vision for a sustainable future in a new collection of thought pieces published by the University of East Anglia. The short piece ’Making sustainability social’ was written by Jason Chilvers and Tom Hargreaves on behalf of 3S drawing on our key insights. ‘Visions of a Sustainable Future’ is…
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…
We currently have two competition-funded PhD positions available in the 3S Research Group, to start in September 2020. Both of these positions offer full funding for home and EU students and would be based in the School of Environmental Sciences at UEA, Norwich, UK. Tom Hargreaves and Gill Seyfang are the academic supervisors on the project…
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…
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,…
I am an environmental social scientist conducting interdisciplinary, critically-constructive research around societal engagement with sustainability. I have developed this interest through the investigation of grassroots sustainability innovations, environmental movements, socio-technical energy transitions, and through the exploration of diverse forms of energy democracy in the UK and beyond. Across these areas, my research and teaching engages…
‘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:…
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;…
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…
Lecturer in Ecological Economics. My research interests employ environmental economics thinking and tools often with social science methods to address sustainability concerns around water resources and ecosystem services management in times of change. 3S relevant research includes innovative collaboration with a filmmaker to explore place attachment around river spaces and participatory approaches to flood hazard…
Professor of Environment and Society and Chair of the 3S Research Group in the School of Environmental Sciences at the University of East Anglia. I am a science and technology studies (STS) scholar and geographer concerned with the changing relations between science, innovation and society in contemporary democracies, particularly in environment and sustainability contexts and…
I am interested in the challenge of making everyday life and society more sustainable. Accordingly, my research focuses on how different types of sustainability innovation – from ‘smart’ home technologies to grassroots social innovations like community energy initiatives – operate in everyday settings and situations, and how attempts to govern everyday life impact on patterns…
I am an economic geographer who is interested in the relationships between sustainability, energy and economy. Empirically, my research has focused on fuel poverty, energy transitions, alternative currencies, the Transition Towns movement and alternative food initiatives. My PhD research (at the University of Liverpool) was an ethnographic study of how an ‘alternative milieu’ developed around the…
Senior Lecturer in the School of Environmental Sciences. As an environmental social scientist, my research focuses the relationships between individual understandings of environmental issues – specifically climate change, its causes and consequences over different timescales- and behaviours. I am interested in opportunities and barriers to engagement with climate change, representation and communication of climate data,…
Lecturer in Human Geography. My research is concerned with how societies in different times and places make sense of weather and climate, and with how atmospheric science and technology intersect with politics and power. I recently completed a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship project called ‘Imperial weather: meteorology and the making of twentieth century colonialism’, which…
Lecturer in the Human Geography of the Environment. My research is concerned with institutionalised practices engaging citizens with environmental and science policy issues. I am currently a co-investigator on the UK Energy Research Centre funded project systemic participation and decision-making in UK energy transitions. I am also developing new projects around the concept of…
Reader in Sustainable Consumption, and leader of 3S’s Sustainable Consumption strand. I lead a programme of research on ‘grassroots innovations’ for sustainability. I am an interdisciplinary environmental social scientist, linking sustainability policy agendas with ‘new economics’ theories and cutting-edge community-based practice. My main research interest is around grassroots innovations, which are community-led initiatives which challenge…
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…
Tom Hargreaves’ new book ‘Smart Homes and Their Users’ is now published by SpringerBriefs in Human-Computer Interaction. The book, co-authored with Charlie Wilson, explores systematically – for the first time – the users and use of smart home technologies as a critical component to technology-led design and development.
A team of academics from the Science, Society and Sustainability (3S) Research Group at UEA made waves last week with a pioneering premiere performance of Theoretical Blind Date – the water edition. The social science-based, water-themed dating game show was a standout contribution to the ‘Water for our People and Planet’ research symposium of the…
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 members Jason Chilvers and Helen Pallett are advertising two Calls for Papers for forthcoming conferences around the topic of experiments in participation, building on the work they have undertaken in the Remaking Energy Participation UKERC project.
3S PhD student and researcher Elizabeth Errington has produced a brilliant new series of podcasts about energy, which will be of interest to energy researchers, policy-makers and practitioners alike. They cover a range of issues including justice, gender and behaviour change. This is was Liz has to say about the new series: “Affordable energy is…
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…
On the 20th and 21st September, a Social Sustainability Summit organised by the 3S Research Group at the Enterprise Centre, UEA, will bring together a select group of leading thinkers and practitioners in sustainability, innovation, and public engagement from across different sectors to co-produce a set of guiding principles for transforming social engagement with sustainability.…
Leading sustainability experts join forces with 3S academics to address the sustainability debate. Join the conversation now by posting your own questions to the debate panellists!
A leading 3S academic at the University of East Anglia has been recognised for her exceptional teaching in sustainability, and has been named a National Teaching Fellow by the Higher Education Academy (HEA) today. Dr Gill Seyfang in UEA’s School of Environmental Sciences receives the prestigious title, which is the highest individual recognition for excellence in…
We’re proud to announce that our first pedagogical paper on 3S’s award-winning teaching method Theoretical Theatre, has been published in the Journal of Contemporary European Research, Vol 13 (3) 2017. Our teaching team in 3S has pioneered this exciting and effective teaching innovation, which is catching on across the country and the world. This…
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…
3S (Science, Society and Sustainability) Research Group 