Politicizing energy consumption Call for papers: Annual Meeting of the Association of American Geographers, 9-13 April 2013
Sponsored by the Energy and Environment Specialty Group, and the Political Geography Specialty Group Organizers: Stefan Bouzarovski (University of Birmingham) Conor Harrison (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) Rosie Day (University of Birmingham) Matt Huber (Syracuse University) The dual concerns of climate change and energy scarcity have provided growing public and policy prominence to the drive for reducing household energy demand and increasing the efficiency of energy consumption on a global scale. Much of the initial research work in this domain was aimed at identifying and developing technologies that can help deliver energy efficiency gains in the residential sector. However, it quickly became apparent that various social and cultural issues complicated the take-up of such technologies. Recent years, therefore, have seen the expansion of 'attitude, behaviour and choice' approaches towards the implementation of environmental policy in this sphere; in turn, the tenets of such thinking have been increasingly challenged by the 'social practices' paradigm, which emphasizes, inter alia, the wider materialities, conditionings and norms that govern energy consumption. What is missing from many social science debates surrounding energy efficiency and demand reduction, however, is an elaborate conceptualization of energy consumption as a political site and practice. Although underconsumption and its consequences have been given attention in the rather distinct literature on energy poverty, the relationship between consumption, demand reduction and structural inequalities relating to issues such as class, gender and disability, is insufficiently examined. Furthermore, there is a lack of substantive critical scholarship on the inherently political nature of the domestic sphere as an active site of consumption and of socio-material assemblage (Kaika 2000; Day Biehler and Simon 2011). We are therefore proposing a session that will address these lacunae, with papers that may deal with topics such as: - The politics of energy vulnerability and energy poverty conceptualized at different scales or across material sites; - Energy consumption and political ideologies: how the emphasis on the energy ‘consumer’ allows for articulations of neoliberalism; - The political implications of creating ‘choice’ in energy consumption, especially in terms of selecting energy service providers; - Demand reduction, responsibility and agency; - The politics of the construction of energy needs, entitlements and rights; - Justice and energy consumption; - Territorialities of home in relation to energy consumption; - Intra household dynamics and energy claims; - The politics embedded in particular energy-consuming devices and their use; - Accountingfor non-human nature in the politics of energy consumption; - Inequalitiesin energy consumption: disrupting global North-South binaries about the reasons for undetconsumption. The deadline for submitting abstracts (in line with the AAG’s guidelines, see http://www.aag.org/cs/annualmeeting/call_for_papers/abstract_guidelines) by the 10th of October 2012. Please send abstracts to s.bouzarov...@bham.ac.uk<mailto:s.bouzarov...@bham.ac.uk>.
