Event Reports

Is my vacuum cleaner actually broken or just my attitude to maintenance? Giuseppe Salvia

Posted on November 13, 2014

Giuseppe who works for the UK INDEMAND Centre at Nottingham gave a really excellent talk about vacuum cleaners. More accurately, he gave a talk about how intersecting commercial pressures act together to reduce product life, generate obsolescence, and configure human-material interactions that are prone to breaking down. (more…)

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Using the Laws of Thermodynamics to inform social science research: An engineer’s perspective. Paul Gilbert

Posted on October 16, 2014

Last year, Paul Gilbert, from Manchester University Tyndall Centre, asked Elizabeth about how DEMAND was conceptualising energy. Elizabeth had no real idea how to reply. (more…)

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Summer School: Energy Histories and Energy Futures, 8-10 July 2014

Posted on July 23, 2014

The first DEMAND Summer School lived up to its name with fieldwork, floorball, evening meals and camping trips all taking place in the sunshine.  (more…)

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Back to normal? Demand in the aftermath of disruption. Heather Chappells. Incorporating space and time into energy research in the Southern United States. Conor Harrison

Posted on July 17, 2014

DEMAND Double Bill seminar from two DEMAND visitors: Heather’s talk focused on the relation between crisis and normality – in terms of energy demand.  She introduced a catalogue of questions about this relationship.   (more…)

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Practices and large social phenomena. Ted Schatzki

Posted on June 24, 2014

In brief, Ted's argument was this:  there is a tendency to equate a focus on social practices with a focus on the small scale, and with fine grained ethnographic research.   In contrast Ted argued that there is no reason why theories of practice should not provide compelling and persuasive accounts of ‘large’ scale social phenomena – including markets, forms of governance, and big…

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