2nd April 2014: Jan, Mike A., Joe, Nicola and Elizabeth – Richard in a noisy café for a few moments. Jan used the reading (Military emissions, armed conflicts, border changes and the Kyoto Protocol by Axel Michaelowa & Tobias Koch) to spark off a discussion starting with three core topics: how political and other kinds of disruption reveal understandings of the normal and the stable space; how practices and energy/environment/climate change problems spill over borders and how they relate (or not) to; issues of sovereignty and international relations, and finally, the role of the military as an energy user in its own right. For a summary of the discussion see here
6th May 2014: A group of ten DEMANDers discussed Habits, routines and temporalities of consumption: From individual behaviours to the reproduction of everyday practices by Dale Southerton (Time & Society 2013 22: 335-355). For a summary of the discussion see here
2nd July 2014: The Group discussed ‘Accomplished by methods which are indefensible’: Electric utilities, finance, and the natural barriers to accumulation, Geoforum 49 (2013) 173–183, by Conor Harrison and for this reading group we had the author in the room, as Conor is currently a DEMAND visitor at Lancaster, and Anna on Skype. For a summary of the discussion see here
22nd July 2014: The Demand Reading Group read and discussed a selection of pages (1-17, 350-77) from “Hughes, Thomas P. Networks of Power: Electrification in Western Society, 1880-1930. Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 1983. For a summary of the discussion see here
14 October 2014: Elizabeth Shove, Matt Watson and Nicola Spurling discussed the draft article for the European Journal of Social Theory, special issue on climate change.
25 November 2014: Gordon Walker presented material from the Paris and Taiwan workshops bringing together the outcomes from Project 4.1: The right to energy: ambivalent, contingent, problematic.
9 December 2014: Discussion of draft of Theme 1 Paper currently called ‘Joining up the Kilowatts’ – looking at how energy is defined and understood in different fields.