Details of Workshops and Calls for Abstracts

What energy is for: the making and dynamics of demand

The DEMAND Centre Conference 2016

Abstracts submitted to the DEMAND Conference 2016 must engage with one of the 13 workshop themes, so you should read through the description of workshops in this document and indicate when making your submission which workshop you want your abstract to be considered for. All submissions are to be made using the online submission system – see link on the conference web pages.

You can make only one submission as first author and presenter, but can be a co-author on multiple submissions. Decisions on accepted papers will be made by workshop conveners who you may contact before the submission deadline to advise on relevance and fit.

The deadline for abstract submissions is 5th October 2015

All accepted participants will be required to prepare a written version of their paper (normally between 3000 and 4000 words in length) by the deadline of 1^st March 2016.

Whilst most of the workshops will take a relatively conventional format of paper presentations, some will be designed differently and may ask for, or encourage different forms of pre-writing and/or presentation. Where this is case the call for each workshop detailed below will provide specific guidance.

We plan to make all papers available as online proceedings. However, authors may decline to have their papers published in this form.

List of workshops

Workshop 1: Time, temporality and energy demand

Convenors: Gordon Walker (Lancaster University) and Ben Anderson (University of Southampton)

Time and various forms of temporality are becoming increasingly relevant for the analysis of energy demand, its constitution, variation, patterning and dynamics. If we see energy demand as a product of the vast array of interwoven activities and practices reproducing and shifting across society, then temporal patterns that are already embedded in the social world are critically important for developing our understanding of how energy demand varies over and with time. They are also significant in terms of policy and commercial ambitions to shift demand out of peak periods and to match demand with supply and especially to low-carbon energy flows. This workshop will therefore focus on how energy demand can be conceptualised and investigated temporally, across multiple temporal scales and units (daily, weekly, seasonal, decadal etc..) and for different geographies (nations, communities, households, networks, pathways). The workshop actively seeks to bring together work focused on the temporality of activities, practices and energy uses in home settings, work settings and mobility systems, and from across different international contexts.

Papers contributions are sought which seek to:

integrate social theory on time into understandings of the constitution and dynamics of energy demand, including, for example, through working with concepts of rhythm, simultaneity, periodicity, synchronicity and acceleration;
develop empirical analyses of the patterning of demand over time, at different scales and using or experimenting with a potential diversity of methods (from the quantitative to the ethnographic);
explore the institutional, social and political implications of the availability and use of more temporally specific and detailed forms of knowledge about the timings and time patterns of energy use;
critically investigate the ambitions of political or commercial agendas and futures concerning peak demand, flexibility and mechanisms of time-shifting, both within and beyond the electricity network and including implications of and for social inequality and exclusion.

This workshop will be based around a set of presentations of pre-written papers, which can take the form of standard research papers or more speculative think pieces. Other activities such as panel discussions will potentially also be included.

Please contact Gordon Walker (g.p.walker@lancaster.ac.uk) if you have any questions about this workshop

Workshop 2: Professions and energy demand

Convenors: James Faulconbridge & Nicola Spurling (Lancaster University)

This workshop will focus on two connected aspects detailed below:

The Professions and Energy Demand: constituting demand through knowledge and practice

How are patterns and trajectories of daily life (moving around, at work, at home, and all the spaces in-between) shaped by professional expertise and/or systems? Or, put another way, what are the relationships between the professions – their expertise, organisation and practices – and the (re)making of demand in daily life? We seek to explore these questions in relation to the professions broadly defined; this encompasses both ‘old’ professions such as architects and planners, but also ‘newer’ occupations of relevance to questions of energy demand (e.g. energy services managers, smart meter installers). Contributions should focus on the systems, practices and expertise of one or more professions and the patterns of energy demand and practices of daily life with which their work intersects. Both theoretical and empirical papers are invited and might address: how jurisdictions and systems of professions affect energy demand; changes in public and private and the role of markets in professional domains; standards, codes and other implicit/explicit assumptions that are part of professional work; how demand is built into different sectors by one or more professions; how professions contribute to demand being built into infrastructures (e.g. water, transport, energy, waste); conceptual tools and methodological designs for studying the role of the professions in constituting energy demand; the implications of such research for approaches to steering demand. We are particularly interested in contributions which highlight the relationships between professional systems and practices and the (re)making of ordinary everyday practice.

The Professions and energy demand: demanding professional work

Professional work, in the ‘old’ professions such as architecture and law but also in ‘new’ expert occupations such as management consultancy and human resource management, is changing. Key trends include: globalisation, flexibilisation, ‘googlisation’, the blurring boundaries of home and work, near and far, changing office organisation and life, work at home, work on the move, ever more integrated European and global labour markets. Ideas about career are changing too, often entailing greater mobility within and between organisations. What are the implications of such developments in professional work for energy demand? Which professions/occupations are on high energy trajectories? Why is that the case? What forms of practice in professional work generate energy demand, and how have these practices come to be? What concepts and methods can we bring to the analysis of energy demand in professional work? In this session we will explore these issues, by considering topics such as: ICT and working Lives; the location of professional work, and the energy implications of changing work at home, in the office, and on the move; the systems and expectations that govern professional work and their implications for energy demand; the role of business travel in professional work; the way the spatiality of professional communities and networks affect work practice and in turn energy demand; the insights of studying the changing professions for high and low carbon futures of work…

This workshop will be based around a set of pre-written papers and associated presentations, with other activities such as panel discussions potentially to be included.

Please contact James Faulconbridge (j.faulconbridge@lancaster.ac.uk) if you have any questions about this workshop

Workshop 3: Conceptualising change in energy demand

Convenors: Louise Reardon (University of Leeds), Stanley Blue, Elizabeth Shove, Janine Morley (Lancaster University), Greg Marsden (University of Leeds)

The aim of this workshop is to consider ways of thinking about how changes in energy demand, and in energy-demanding ways of life happen. Some changes are gradual, occurring over several generations, whilst others appear to happen more immediately. There are different types of change in activity and energy demand, some of which are readily accounted for: others of which are much harder to detect and explain. And some changes continue to refuse to happen, or just get stuck! Concepts for understanding and explaining different rates of change, how change is enacted at different sites along with related forms of persistence and obduracy are currently under developed and under studied as topics in their own right.

This call is for papers that present an empirical example or case of change in energy demand and in what energy is used for. These might be examples of changes at different sites, examples of more rapid or slow kinds of change, or even cases of prolonged obduracy or stasis. We are seeking contributions which conceptualise change in different ways, from a variety of disciplinary perspectives, but which do so through analysis of empirical cases that speak to the DEMAND Centre’s approach.

The presentation of these empirical case studies will form part of the workshop programme which will also include presentations and position papers from DEMAND researchers and from an invited panel of experts whose work focuses on conceptualising change. Participants are asked to respond to this call by describing their case study in their abstract and explaining how it speaks to the workshops themes.

This workshop is linked with the ‘Steering energy demand’ workshop but submissions should be made to one or the other

Please contact Stanley Blue (s.blue@lancaster.ac.uk) if you have any questions about this workshop

Workshop 4: Steering energy demand

Convenors: Louise Reardon (University of Leeds), Stanley Blue, Elizabeth Shove, Janine Morley (Lancaster University) and Greg Marsden (University of Leeds)

This workshop concentrates on the scope for deliberate intervention which impacts on demand in different sectors, or which provides understandings of the limitations of deliberate steering.

This call is for papers that present an empirical example or case of efforts to reconfigure energy demanding practices, at any scale. These might be examples of efforts to steer change at different sites, by single or multiple types of organisations/actors; or to intervene in complexes of practice, in systems of provision or in the ways in which problems are conceptualised and framed. The aim is not to evaluate the success of these undertakings. Rather, we are seeking contributions which conceptualise the ‘steering’ of social practices in different ways through analysis of empirical cases. This may be from any disciplinary perspective.

The presentation of these empirical case studies will form part of the workshop programme which will also include presentations and position papers from DEMAND researchers and from an invited panel of experts whose work focuses on the challenges of steering demand. Participants are asked to respond to this call by describing their case study in their abstract and explaining how it speaks to the workshops themes

This workshop is linked with the ‘Conceptualising change in energy demand’ workshop, but submissions should be made to one or the other.

Please contact Louise Reardon (l.reardon@leeds.ac.uk) if you have any questions about this workshop

Workshop 5: Sharing and energy demand

Convenors: Rachel Preston (Lancaster University) and Sylvie Douzou (EDF R&D)

Recently the individual ownership of goods and services has come under attack, with academics and laypersons calling for greater sharing usually through the pooling of resources including cars, tools or spaces. In her 2010 book ‘What’s mine is yours’, Rachel Botsman calls collaborative consumption a ‘new way of life’. She homes in on goods with a ‘high idling capacity’, such as privately owned power drills which are used on average only for around 12 minutes during their entire lifetimes; when “what you really need is the hole not the drill”. Coined in 1978 by Felson and Spaeth, the term ‘collaborative consumption’ was popularised in the mid-2000s due to the emerging sector of peer-to-peer lending. It’s defined as a class of economic arrangements through which participants share access to products or services, rather than having individual ownership, which in turn is often predicated on the use of IT or online-marketplaces. In 2011, TIME Magazine hailed collaborative consumption as one of the ‘10 ideas that will change the world’. Yet buzzwords such as the sharing economy and collaborative consumption are often tied up in behaviouralist and economic discourse, and the related idea of ‘pro-sumers’. Is the sharing economy such a new or innovative phenomenon as its advocates claim?

Looking at the sharing of individual commodities in isolation is a fairly reductive and narrow view. In relation to energy, policy often refers to ‘per-capita’ energy consumption, but energy is often not (if at all) consumed individually, such as heating, lighting, and hot water. This refers to the kinds of ‘implicit’ or ‘everyday’ sharing which come from living and working together. ‘Sharing’ in this sense may seem quite an ambiguous concept. For instance, what does it mean to share a warm living room? Or use energy cooking a meal for the family? These forms of sharing often feed into a larger picture of patterns of temporal organisation, routine and synchronisation, co-presence, timetabling and scheduling.

This workshop invites participants to consider how sharing (in all its various modes) is relevant to changing forms of energy demand; with the broad but unifying question ‘how is energy shared?’ recognising that energy is not used for its own sake but as part of the accomplishment of social practices. Participants will contemplate scales of sharing – from specific materials, to routines and practices, spaces, and whole ways of life – and consider what is important for energy demand.

In addition to engaging with these general themes, suggestions of potential specific topics include:

critically engaging with ‘collaborative consumption’ and related discourses
discussions on sharing materials, sharing infrastructures, and/or sharing spaces (homes, workplaces) and their implications for the ways and forms in which energy is demanded
how different understandings and norms of sharing and/or private ownership have fluctuated through time.

Please contact Rachel Preston (r.preston1@lancaster.ac.uk) if you have any questions about this workshop

Workshop 6: Energy and money

Convenors: Giulio Mattioli, Caroline Mullen and Greg Marsden (University of Leed)

To understand energy demand, many researchers maintain that we need to investigate the specific ways in which energy is used in everyday life. This contrasts with the assumption that we can understand energy primarily a single commodity, which like other goods, can be translated as – ‘the grand equalizer’ – money. It is this economic approach to analysing energy demand which has been dominant in the transport and domestic energy sectors. Perhaps surprisingly, but in contrast, current accounts of energy-consuming practices often say little about how monetary resources can shape and constrain ‘what people do’, and the energy demand that results from it.

This workshop theme aims to gather theoretical, empirical and methodological approaches that cover the vacant middle ground between these approaches. It will bring into conversation research from within and beyond DEMAND and from a range of disciplines, to develop original insights into how monetary resources are involved, alongside other factors, in making and transforming energy demand. Possible topics include, for example:

the relationships between poverty and energy use (e.g. fuel-, transport- and energy-poverty);
the distinctive energy consumption practices of the wealthiest sectors of society;
the distributional impacts and justice implications of energy policies such as taxes, subsidies and pricing;
the impacts of changes in how public money is spent (e.g. austerity) on energy-consumption;
the role of private household debt/credit in sustaining and making possible a variety of (often unsustainable) energy-consuming practices;
methodological approaches to using expenditure data as a trace of energy consuming practices

This workshop will be based around a set of pre-written papers and associated presentations, with other activities such as panel discussions potentially to be included.

Please contact Giulio Mattiloi (G.Mattioli@leeds.ac.uk) if you have any questions about this workshop

Workshop 7: The role of standards and standardisation in making demand

Convenors: John Connaughton (University of Reading) and Noel Cass (Lancaster University)

Standards play an important role in specifying the provision of infrastructures of lighting, heating, cooling, ventilation, and appliance power supplies. These standards arise from a number of institutional environments from building regulations and planning law through to ‘branding’ of buildings’ theoretical energy efficiency through the Energy Performance Certificate scheme. In the field of transport, standards can also been seen to operate in slightly different ways – for example the co-existence (at present) of different standards for charging connections for Electric Vehicles, or the ways in which different payment systems can be made interoperable through pre-paid smartcards, such as the Oyster card in London, to promote flexibility of modal choice.

We have theorised standards as having a number of roles, specifically as providing products, infrastructures or levels of service that are:

a. acceptable;

b. legitimate

c. expected;

d. uniform; and

e. interoperable.

We have also identified that standards are subject to processes of globalisation that may depart from local specificities and to ‘upward ratcheting’, as expectations of certain levels of service, comfort, convenience and so forth rise over time. In the context of property markets, we have also identified an ‘iPhone mentality’ – each iteration of design starting from a new baseline incorporating what were previously exceptional levels of performance or service. Standards also emerge as the results of processes of political or interests based negotiations, sometimes acting as direct state steering but more often on a governance model in which the private sector and the market formalises guidance and voluntary rankings into expectations.

We invite contributions in the form of papers that address the nature and role of standards and standardisation across the DEMAND research themes of buildings, transport and everyday life, particularly highlighting how they intersect with the generation or containment of energy demand. We welcome contributions that could explore these different roles for standards and standardization in a theoretical or empirical manner, including to address the following questions:

How might standards be reconfigured to support the need to address energy demand and carbon dioxide emissions in the transition implied by a decarbonising society?
Can standards play a role beyond facilitating the tradability of markets?
Do standards obscure the empirical reality of infrastructures in use?

This workshop will be based around a set of pre-written papers and associated presentations, with other activities such as panel discussions potentially to be included.

Please contact Noel Cass (n.cass1@lancaster.ac.uk) if you have any questions about this workshop

Workshop 8: Conceptualising futures of energy demand

Convenors: Lenneke Kuijer and Matt Watson (University of Sheffield)

Debates about energy are shaped by imagined futures. Knowledges and uncertainties over projections of reserves; expectations of technologies; scenarios of climate change and assumptions of social stability and progress all share in shaping corporate strategy, state policy, civil society campaigns as well as academic research agendas. Imagined futures clearly play a range of roles in shaping action now that engender or embed dynamics (of both change and of obduracy) that will partly condition the shape of actual futures, and the demand for energy that accompanies them.

This theme comprises two paper sessions on related themes as described below.

Conceptualising futures

Papers in this session engage with the roles that concepts of futures (e.g. expectations, visions, scenarios, assumptions, projections, imaginaries, fictions) play in various realms of research and practice, such as for example philosophy, history, sociology, policy, industry, academia, or everyday life. Contributions that engage with futures of energy demand are warmly welcomed.

Paper proposals are invited to engage with questions such as:

What concepts, theories and methods are and have been used to engage with futures?
What are different perspectives on how the present produces futures?
What work do uses of imagined futures do and for whom?
What is the role of history in futures-in-the-present?

Imagining low carbon futures

Papers in this session specifically engage with the ways in which imagined futures are and can be deployed for shaping low-carbon futures. Methodological papers and critical reflections are encouraged. Examples are discussions of future-oriented approaches like backcasting, scenario making, forecasting, living labs and research through design. Papers for this session are invited to engage with questions such as:

How can low-carbon futures be imagined and have their bearing on pathways of change?
How can imagined futures be evaluated?
How can imagined futures be used for researching the present or paths of change?
How can concepts of stability and change, desirability and plausibility, normativity and ethics be balanced in imagined futures and their making?

This workshop will be based around a set of pre-written papers and associated presentations, with two discussants from different fields invited to offer reflections on the sessions. Other activities such as panel discussions will also potentially be included.

Please contact Lenneke Kuijer (s.c.kuijer@sheffield.ac.uk) if you have any questions about this workshop

Workshop 9: Space, site and scale in the making of energy demand

Convenors: Allison Hui (Lancaster University), Alan Wiig (UMass Boston) and Gordon Walker (Lancaster University)

There is much to be analysed about both how energy demand is made by spatially organised and located practices and processes, and how energy demand is integral to the making of places, spaces and flows at different scales. This session is concerned with exploring various forms of spatiality, which can be taken to cover a range of dimensions: ‘objective’ space (as independent of human activity and geographically static), social constructions of space, place and scale (which might for example include ‘home’ that has a range of meanings attached to it), and the situatedness of social practices (as in Schatzki’s discussion of practices as the site of the social). Spatial dynamics may therefore involve changing dynamics of where people access and use energy in objective space, changing expectations around the social spaces where energy services are available, or changes in how particular practices are situated in and demand energy in different sites.

Paper submissions might engage with these questions in many different ways and in relation to energy use in mobility systems, in buildings, outdoors and in other contexts. Potential themes of analysis include:

Energy demand in multiple sites – how do both established patterns and transformations in everyday practices necessitate attention to energy’s use in, or distribution across varied and multiple sites and spaces?
Reconfiguring spaces of energy consumption – how are social processes transforming, rescaling and resizing the sites in which energy is consumed, as well as the categories with which it is addressed?
Geography shaping demand – to what extent does the location of energy demand affect or shape energy demand – particularly when this involves transport as well as electricity, gas, etc? What are the relations between the spaces of end use technologies, infrastructures and demand?
Managing demand spatially – what processes are involved in the management or steering of demand, at institutional or household levels? How are these spatially organized, and/or what spatialized outcomes do they generate?
Digital and discursive spaces – how do practices in digital or discursive spaces – including online, in the media, in policy – affect understandings of energy demand and its implications?
Crossings, paths and junctions – how is energy demand constituted in relation to the mobilities of people, ideas, technologies through varied spaces?

Please contact Allison Hui (a.hui@lancaster.ac.uk) if you have any questions about this workshop

Workshop 10: Automating everyday life

Convenors: Yolande Strengers (RMIT University), Ben Anderson (University of Southampton), Janine Morley and Mike Hazas (Lancaster University)

The Internet of Things is predicted to be the next big digital revolution. As part of this unfolding future some researchers, energy policy makers, utility providers and analysts propose automated, ‘set and forget’, incremental adjustment or ‘prices to devices’ technologies as a way to free people from having to explicitly manage their energy consumption during the performance of everyday activities. Home control stations, automated thermostats, electric cars, robotic vacuum cleaners, and time-sensitive washing machines or dishwashers are all part of this future ‘smart’ vision. Simultaneously, automation is pervading other facets of everyday life where energy is not a primary concern. Whole-of-property surveillance, mood-specific lighting, disco rooms, home theatres, driverless cars, and wearable technologies such as smart watches are being promoted as ways to enhance or transform how people live.

The key objective of this workshop is to provoke inter-disciplinary debate in order to interrogate if, and how, automated technologies can contribute to lower energy demand, and what else we might gain, or lose, as automation become more integrated into everyday life. To do this we ask questions such as:

How are automated technologies, devices or functions changing (or how might they change) everyday practices, expectations and associated energy demand?
What might automation mean for expectations of comfort, cleanliness, convenience, entertainment and security?
How does the automated vision for energy savings and efficiency sit alongside other visions for automation, including depictions of more (or less) luxurious and pleasurable ways of life?
How is automation expanding or blurring the boundaries between the home, natural environments, systems of provision and/or their suppliers and advocates?
What are the likely energy implications of the unfolding automated ‘revolution’?
What are the ethical and political considerations of seeking to place automated devices ‘in control’ of everyday life?

We invite provocative contributions that speak to one or more of these questions, including perspectives from the past, present and possible future. This may take a number of formats, including short pre-written position papers and related presentations. Experimentations, demonstrations and/or evidence-based provocations are especially welcome. The workshop will aim to feature automation in its structure, organisation and experience. Participants will be invited to reflect on these experiences alongside discussion of participants’ contributions.

Please contact Yolande Strengers (yolande.strengers@rmit.edu.au) if you have any questions about this workshop

Workshop 11: Entitlement, expectation and excess in energy demand

Convenors: Russell Hitchings, Sue Venn (University College London), Rosie Day (University of Birmingham)

The demand for energy is linked to a myriad of activities and pursuits, some mundane and every day, some more exceptional. What amounts and forms of energy consumption are considered negotiable, and what are not? What is reasonable, and what is excessive, for whom, and who decides?

Notions of entitlement to energy are invoked by concerns over fuel poverty and energy poverty, where the amount of energy a household is able to access or afford is deemed to be below that which is reasonable, however that is decided and defined. Ideas of energy justice, however, to some extent contextualise the sense of a right to energy in a wider situation of limits to fuel resources and allowable emissions, such that ideally overall energy consumption must be constrained. Questions therefore arise of who is entitled to what energy consumption, and on what basis that can be decided.

Whilst fuel poverty and energy justice focus on energy rather directly, senses of entitlement and expectation in everyday life that have implications for energy demand generally relate to specific activities, practices and uses of energy services. What then are the energy consuming things and activities that people feel they can expect in normal life? Who is entitled to what, and how does this change over time and space, over generations, the lifecourse, or between sites and regions? When are discourses of entitlement deployed, by whom, and what work do they do?

The idea of excessive energy demand is implicit when necessary limits to energy consumption are pointed to, yet it may be a notion that is unattractive, involving as it does a moral, disciplinary connotation as well as the potential to limit individual freedoms and collective goals. As well as searching for where judgements of excessive energy consumption occur, and to whom they are applied, we might also consider where they are not appearing, and how they are avoided. Who are the very high energy consumers and what constitutes their energy demand? What is their influence on norms and aspirations? Do we need a moral vocabulary of energy consumption?

This workshop will be based around a set of pre-written papers and associated presentations, with other activities such as panel discussions potentially to be included.

Please contact Russell Hitchings (r.hitchings@ucl.ac.uk) if you have any questions about this workshop

Workshop 12: Non-Permanent infrastructures and energy demand

Convenors: Mike Allen and Joe Gillett (Lancaster University)

Many non-permanent infrastructures can be seen all over the world, from disaster relief zones and refugee camps to major sporting events and music festivals. Investigation of these non-permanent infrastructures can reveal insights into the social practices and social needs that require the production of the material infrastructure. This may yield important lessons for making permanent infrastructures more sustainable, utilising off-grid energy and coping with peak energy demand.

The aim of the workshop is to explore ways of understanding non-permanent infrastructures and how they are implicated in change in social practices and energy demand. The workshop will explore the following themes:

What is a non-permanent infrastructure?
Permanent and non-permanent infrastructure interactions
Creating non-permanent infrastructures
Commonalities and differences amongst different non-permanent infrastructures
Shifting practices (co-evolution of temporary infrastructures and social practices)
Seasonality, geography, demographics and non-permanent infrastructures
Historical change and event proliferation
Legislation, planning, regulations and non-permanent infrastructures

We are seeking papers related to the above themes, but suggestions for others are also welcome. Presenters are encouraged to think creatively about how they approach the topic and presentation. The workshop will offer an opportunity to explore the above themes in a stimulating and interdisciplinary environment. We are particularly keen to see a variety of disciplines represented.

Please contact Mike Allen (m.allen2@lancaster.ac.uk) if you have any questions about this workshop

Workshop 13: Cross-national and cross-cultural research in the field of energy demand

Convenors: Sylvie Douzou (EDF R&D), Mattijs Smits (Wageningen University) and Giulio Mattioli (University of Leeds)

The central question underpinning this workshop is: What can we learn from comparing diverging and converging energy-related practices within and beyond Western Societies?

This workshop explores theoretical approaches, conceptual tools as well as empirical work aiming to compare national and cultural situations in order to better understand energy demand and mobility. We recognize that energy is not used for its own sake but is only a means to carry out activities and access services. Therefore, the relations between social practice, innovations and institutional arrangements influencing energy consumption are deeply anchored in the material, cultural and social nature of a given society at a certain historical moment.

Some practices involving energy demand and mobility clearly vary according to the national and cultural contexts in which they are performed while some others possibly vary less. But, which ones and why? Also, there is probably divergence behind a priori convergent patterns, social meanings and impacts according to social groups, historical periods or dominant cultural shared conventions. Again, how and why? Moreover, national contexts often vary in terms of their ‘energy mix’, standards, infrastructures, regulation of energy markets and shared ideas about which activities should be guaranteed. How do these factors influence outcomes in terms of practices and energy demand?

Learning from cross-national studies within Western Societies remains a challenge. Learning more from the Global South (Asia, Africa and Latin America) is perhaps an even greater challenge as energy demand and mobility are changing rapidly in these parts of world, yet have not received much scholarly attention. What can these comparisons bring to our understanding of energy demand?

Since comparison is at the heart of social science (sociology, history, cultural anthropology, human geography, political sciences, development studies), how do different disciplines mobilize specific theoretical knowledge, conceptual tools and methods in order to produce fresh and complementary thinking? How can effective cross-cultural comparisons be designed that take into account various dimensions and scales of analysis (for instance, specificities related to local, national and international policies, energy regimes, conventions and institutional arrangements)?

Abstracts are welcome which engage with any of these or adjacent themes. The workshop will be based around a set of pre-written papers and associated presentations, with other activities such as panel discussions potentially to be included.

Please contact Sylvie Douzou (sylvie.douzou@edf.fr) if you have any questions about this workshop

Main conference webpage

Details of Workshops and Calls for Abstracts

Understanding Demand

What is energy for?

How is demand made?

Normality and need

Energy Efficiency

Influencing Demand

Policies for steering demand

Invisible energy policy

Adapting social practices

Commission on Travel Demand

How Demand Varies

Temporal and spatial variation

Time pressures and peak demand

Institutional rhythms

Flexibility

Situations, Sites, Sectors

Domestic IT use

Home heating

Offices and office work

Business travel

Online shopping

Car dependence

Older people and mobile lives

Local smart grids

Cooking and cooling in Asia

Energy, Justice and Poverty

Applying justice concepts

Fuel and transport poverty

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