EnGRG Videos & Resources

This talk is the second of eight in our 2023 'Health x Energy' webinar series. In it, Dr. Elisa Schramm explores how residents in two Catalan eco-communities have negotiated thermal discomfort in practice. These eco-communities, dedicated to living sustainably, communally and autonomously, have overwhelmingly renounced relying on (fossil-fuelled) energy grids and have attempted to produce warmth off-the-grid, mainly through wood heating and insulation practices. They also largely disregard Western thermal conventions for ‘healthy’ indoor temperatures as well as for health concerns around wood-heating. Considering how thermal discomforts are negotiated on site, including the contradictions that emerged can therefore be useful for informing interventions to effect change towards lower-carbon heating and sustainable living more generally in society at large. Building on David Bissell’s work on discomfort and stress and Jane Bennett’s theorisations of motivation, I conceive of thermal comfort as a contingent more-than-human achievement between human bodies, their proximate environment as well as of particular value sets. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, I will tease apart the intricate dynamics between values and affects in three examples of how eco-community residents dealt with thermal discomfort and off-the grid heating.

This is the first of eight talks in our 2023 'Health x Energy' webinar series. In this session, Rosie Knowles (Royal Holloway) will describe her ongoing doctoral research on the theme of 'therapeutic landscapes', exploring the connections between energy, industry, pollution and health. Rosie's research relates to health and energy geographies as it explores the ‘therapeutic landscapes’ of the coastal industrial town of Port Talbot, South Wales. Port Talbot is a heavy industrial town, with one of the largest steelworks in Europe. Her PhD explores how the industrial setting hinders or promotes therapeutic experiences, adding to the complexities of ‘therapeutic landscapes’. She undertook ethnographic fieldwork living in Port Talbot, using a variety of methods from walking interviews, semi-structured interviews, creative writing/ story-telling, drawing and print-making. She worked with a men’s charity, conducting walks with ex-steelworkers and interviewed stakeholders in the town including councillors, trade unions, environmentalists and Tata steel, to build up a picture of well-being. Her PhD draws on cultural geography studies on toxic landscapes, as well as feminist geographies exploring pollution and the body, whilst building on the health geography concept of therapeutic landscapes - extending it to industrial coastal environments.

Recording of keynotes for our 'Methods in Energy Geographies' workshop, July 2022. Speakers: Professor Gavin Bridge (Durham University), and Doctor Ping Huang (University of Sheffield) Timestamps: 00:07 Gavin Bridge, 'Methods in Energy Geographies' 20:39 Ping Huang, 'Qualitative Methods' 39:22 Q&A

Recording of Dr Anne Owen's keynote speech for our July 2022 workshop on methods in energy geographies. 00:00 Note 00:05 Anne Owens 27:52 Q&A

Speakers: Shannon Elizabeth Bell (Virginia Tech), Christine Labuski (Virginia Tech), Cara Daggett (Virginia Tech) Part of the EnGRG's 'Energy, Gender, Space' webinar series 2021/22.

Webinar with Professor Ingrid Nelson (University of Vermont), as part of our 2022 Energy, Gender, Space series. Recorded 18th March 2022. In this talk, Ingrid introduces an emerging feminist digital natures (FDN) approach (in collaboration with Roberta Hawkins and Leah Govia), connecting feminist digital geographies, feminist political ecology and digital natures research. Drawing from multi-sited event ethnography and automethods, she examines energy transition politics in university campus sustainability contexts, and the kinds of questions regarding embodiment, labour and emotion that come out of thinking with FDN. Please note, this webinar was recorded during the Coronavirus pandemic, whilst colleagues were working from home. Part of the video has been edited to protect the identities of participants' children.

Talk by Rihab Khalid and Maiss Razem (Cambridge University) as part of the 2021-22 Energy, Gender, Space webinar series - a collaboration between the Energy Geographies Research Group and the Gender and Feminist Geographies Research Group. The nexus of gendered domestic practices, energy and space use remains under-researched in energy studies, particularly in the Global South. Our study addresses this gap by taking a gendered practice-theoretical approach to investigate women’s differential energy and space use in domestic practices. Through a qualitative comparative analysis of middleclass housing in Lahore, Pakistan and Amman, Jordan, we show that energy and space use are implicated in the gendering of domestic practices in different ways. The study highlights the limitations of current gender-neutral and gender-binary approaches in housing and energy and calls for greater socio-cultural understanding of gender relations and intersectional agencies for improved equity and sustainability.

Talk by Özge Yaka (Potsdam University) as part of the 2021-22 Energy, Gender, Space webinar series - a collaboration between the Energy Geographies Research Group and the Gender and Feminist Geographies Research Group. Building on ethnographic work on local community movements against private, small-scale, run-of-the-river hydropower plants in three different regions of Turkey, this paper introduces a body-centered approach to explore the dynamics of women’s committed activism in the context of anti-hydropower movement. The paper shifts the focus to the lived bodies of women and their connection to the living environments, without falling back into essentialist conceptions of gender. In doing so, it employs in-depth ethnographic data to discuss the centrality of corporeal connections with river waters in shaping women’s political agency against hydropower.

Webinar from Saska Petrova (University of Manchester) and Neil Simcock (Liverpool John Moores University). This is part of the 2021-22 Energy, Gender and Space webinar series, a collaboration between the Energy Geographies Research Group and the Gender and Feminist Geographies Research Group.