Call for papers: The greening of everyday life

A call for papers has been circulated for a workshop “The Greening of Everyday Life: Reimagining Environmentalism in Postindustrial Societies”: http://www.carsoncenter.uni muenchen.de/download/events/cfps/greening_of_everyday_life.pdf>

The event is sponsored by the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society and will take place in Munich, 19-21 June 2014.

The *deadline for proposals is July 15*, those considering submitting a proposal are encouraged to contact the organizers, John Meyer (john.meyer@humboldt.edu) or Jens Kersten  (jens.kersten@jura.uni-muenchen.de) with questions or ideas well in advance of the deadline.

Travel expenses for invited participants will be paid by the Carson
Center.

More information

While environmental challenges including climate change threaten the
very fabric of our lives, such that the present course of our societies appears literally  unsustainable, ambitious efforts to address these rarely seem to resonate with the everyday concerns and ideas most  pressing to citizens in
post-industrial societies.

This workshop will focus upon the normative implications of everyday
material practices for environmental action. In particular, the workshop
will focus upon land, transportation, and household practices. In each of these areas, human experience is inextricably  interwoven with technology, the
built environment, and the non-human world. The aim is to approach the
political challenges of environmental sustainability by examining these
everyday practices and the concerns they foster directly, rather than a
more abstract environmental discourse that suggests the need to overcome
these concerns.

Attention to this materialist basis of environmental concern has long
been central in poorer and less industrialized societies, as well as some movements for environmental  and climate justice. Yet it has
been far less prominent in analyses of environmental concern in Europe,  North America, and Oceania. Moreover, attention to practices has often been overshadowed by  both individual and structural approaches. This workshop aims to generate new insights into  the possibilities for environmental action and change by exploring these  everyday material practices, reflecting the social,
economic, and ecological ambivalences of greening everyday life. Analyzing everyday practices invites vital questions about:

* concepts of property and ownership;
*   the relevance and meaning of citizenship;
* the character and scope of public and private spheres;
* the role of new movements;
* diverse notions of governance;
* popular understandings of freedom; and
* understandings of what counts as “the environment” and ”environmentalism” in postindustrial societies.

It is anticipated that such questions will be the focal point of papers and workshop discussion. Proposals are invited from scholars in the environmental humanities and  interpretive social sciences. Papers should centrally address one or more of the three areas (land, transport, or household practices), in order to reimagine or illuminate some aspect of the conceptual framework necessary to foster more sustainable practices.

Invited participants will be required to submit their completed paper
(approximately 6000 words), in English, by 23 May 2014. These will be circulated to all participants  in advance of the workshop.

The Rachel Carson Center will cover the travel cost and accommodation
expenses for invited participants. It is expected that papers will then
be revised with the goal of publishing an edited book.

To answer this call for proposals, send a CV and a proposal of 300–400
words, including a title, to the conference conveners by 15 July 2013.
For further questions, please contact either of the event conveners:

Conveners’ Contact Details
Jens Kersten & John Meyer
LMU Munich Humboldt State University
Rachel Carson Center Rachel Carson Center
jens.kersten@jura.uni-muenchen.de
john.meyer@humboldt.edu

Energy vulnerability seminar in Manchester this week

This week the University of Manchester will host an international seminar on the spatial, social and environmental dimensions of energy vulnerability. We have already announced the call for papers and participants for this event several times on this blog.

The gathering, which is supported by the Meeting Place of the UK Energy Research Centre (UKERC), will run from midday on the 21st of May until midday on the 23rd of May. It includes an early career symposium with papers by more than 20 researchers working in this field (21-22 May), and a research colloquium (22-23 May) featuring presentations by a range of leading academics and policy-makers. More than 60 participants from across the UK and Europe are expected to attend.

The event is a joint initiative of the Energy Geographies Working Group of the Royal Geographical Society, and the International Energy Vulnerability Network. The two organisations will bring together academic researchers, policy advocates and members of community groups to consider the ‘pathways to vulnerability’ through which individuals and communities become exposed to fuel poverty.

In a broader sense, the event is aimed at discussing ways in which the current definition of fuel poverty can move beyond the energy affordability-efficiency nexus onto wider questions of recognition, need, and social justice. We will also open a discussion of the community dimensions of fuel poverty, especially in terms of the extent to which area-based, local government-led interventions can provide effective policies to address the issue. A number of contributions at the event will attempt to link fuel poverty debates more explicitly into the climate change and decarbonisation agenda – particularly with respect to the UK’s multiple future energy supply scenarios.

Several papers will argue that a much more ambitious and comprehensive approach to tacking fuel poverty and energy efficiency improvements will be necessary if we are to genuinely start addressing the driving forces of this predicament – not the least given its stubborn persistence and significant extent in the UK and beyond.

Job Opportunity: KCL Brazil Institute

The Brazil Institute at King’s College London seeks to recruit a Lecturer. This will be a full-time appointment within the Institute, an interdisciplinary unit of the College dedicated to teaching and research on Brazil. It sits alongside other global institutes in the College; these are the China, India, Russia, North American Studies, and International Development Institutes. The global institutes are developing a common set of programmes and activities, and the appointment will be expected to contribute to these.

The successful candidate will be an outstanding scholar who can strengthen the Brazil Institute’s research capacity in relation to one or more of the themes listed below. Applicants are expected to have disciplinary training in any of the social sciences, including economics, and a publication list that includes both monographs and peer-reviewed articles in leading academic journals.

• The Brazilian economy: This includes the functioning of markets, macroeconomic policy, trade, investment, finance, industrial policy, fiscal policy, or the changing role of Brazil in the global economy.

• Brazil and the emerging global order: This includes positions and activities of the Brazilian state within institutions of regional or global governance, or the changing nature of Brazil’s connections with the rest of the world, outside the fields of security and defence.

• Energy and the environment in Brazil: This includes energy policy broadly defined, including energy security and the shift from non-renewable to renewable forms of energy, as well as environmental policy, including the management of forests, water, and other natural resources and the prevention or mitigation of environmental problems.

The closing date for receipt of applications is 7 June 2013. 

For further details visit  www.kcl.ac.uk/jobs

 

Research Seminar: International Energy Law and Policy

RESEARCH SEMINAR IN INTERNATIONAL ENERGY LAW AND POLICY: what is international energy law and policy?

Time: 6 August 2013, 13.00 – 17.00

Venue: Law School at the University of Eastern Finland (UEF), Joensuu (Finland)

Program

“Energy law and policy” as an academic discipline
Professor Kim Talus (UEF)

Research in international energy policy: State of the Art Professor Pami Aalto (UTA)

Research in International Energy Policy: Policies of the EU towards major Oil and Gas Producing Countries

Dr Sanam S Haghighi (Nargan Company, Iran)

Coffee

Thanks to the support from Institute for Natural Resources, Environment and Society (LYY), the attendance is free of charge.
Please register with Ms Kaisa Huhta at kaisa.huhta@uef.fi before 1.8.2013

Free household energy consumption data available online!

As part of their Open Data project, the Centre for Sustainable Energy has assembled a comprehensive dataset of UK household energy consumption.

The dataset is derived from the socio-demographically representative sample of UK households surveyed in the Office of National Statistics Living Costs and Food Survey.

Data from six of these surveys (2004/5 to 2009) was combined, generating a sample size of over 36,000 cases. The dataset, which has been used to develop the analytical model ‘Dimpsa’ (Distributional Impacts Model for Policy Scenario Analysis), aims to provide a better understanding of the distribution of energy consumption patterns across households in Great Britain.

For more information, please click here: http://www.cse.org.uk/resources/open-data/domestic-energy-consumption-data

Upcoming Event: ‘Improving building performance: Sparing no expense to get something on the cheap?’

12th June 2013, UCL Energy Institute, London

Bill Bordass, one of the UK’s leading buildings performance evaluation experts, will be presenting the Inaugural George Henderson Memorial Lecture at the UCL Energy Institute in June.

At this Bill will address why the quest for more sustainable, lower-energy buildings seems to be turning into a complicated, expensive and bureaucratic obstacle race; and what might be done to change this. Following the talk, Steve Selkowitz, head of the Commercial Building Systems Group at Lawrence Berkley National Laboratory, California, will respond to Bill’s points. A question and answer session and drinks reception will follow afterwards. The event will be chaired by Professor Tadj Oreszczyn, Director of the UCL Energy Institute.

The event is free, and you can find out more information and register on the following link: http://bill-bordass.eventbrite.co.uk/#

Call for Papers: ‘Improving Energy Performance in Commercial Property’

The Journal of Property Investment and Finance is calling for papers on improving energy performance in commercial property.

The Special Issue of papers will be published in 2014 and edited by Professor Tim Dixon, Professor in Sustainable Futures and the Built Environment at the University of Reading, with Professor Susan Bright (University of Oxford) and Dr Peter Mallaburn (de Montfort University).

Suggested topic areas include, but are not limited to:

• Landlord tenant relationships and energy;
• Green leases;
• Retrofitting commercial property;
• Energy performance contracting;
• Energy performance and operational energy rating systems;
• Linking commercial property value and energy performance;
• Value transfer in the supply chain;
• Sustainable asset measurement systems;
• International benchmarking of sustainable investments

Closing date for submissions is 1st October 2013. See http://www.reading.ac.uk/web/FILES/cme/JPIF_Call_for_Papers_Energy_-_final_-_NSF.pdf for more information