Seminars

Seminar held: Wednesday 21st September 2016 Australia’s monsoon tropics is characterised by high temperatures combined with extremely high humidity for about half of the year. These conditions pose a profound challenge to human thermoregulation and heat stress is a common experience in the region. The outdoor, labour-intensive workforce is particularly exposed, and produces additional…

Seminar held: Wednesday 13th July 2016 The seminar will propose discussing current energy transitions in the light of the insights offered by an historical enquiry on instrumentality. The proposed approach allows interpreting the present age of complex systems as the result of some fundamental transformations concerning how the conception of human artefacts commonly known as instruments…

This presentation offers some early findings of a research project focused on following a large scale environmental policy oriented on replacing old, often handmade, firewood stove for new high-end kerosene and “pellet” stoves in Southern Chile. The main aim of this policy is to reduce air pollution. The presentation focuses on discussing some preliminary empirical findings as well as…

This talk draws on an international content analysis of online and magazine articles exploring the ideas embedded in visions for the 21st Century smart home. In particular, I analyse smart home advocates' pursuit of  'pleasance' - an ambient and electrically-enabled aesthetic experience which brings 'comfort, romance and peace of mind' into the home (Lutron 2015). Through a series of…

Seminar held: Tuesday 24th May 2016 When new technologies are introduced there is a learning process involved where people need to adjust or invent practices, meanings and knowledge. For instance, as this presentation discusses, the new energy saving light bulb has forced us to think in new ways about light: From the black-boxed Watt to the white-boxed lumen, kelvin, ra. But such…