Energy Lives! Infrastructural Citizenship in Nordic Energy Transitions scrutinizes the conjoined lives of energy and people in the Nordic countries over the past 150 years.
October 2024 to March 2028
Melina Antonia Buns, University of Stavanger
Energy Lives! is a collaborative project with researchers from the University of Stavanger in Norway, Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden and Aarhus University in Denmark.
Project Aim
The Energy Lives! project seeks to understand how publics and communities emerge around ways of living with and through energy transitions and how such publics shape and constrain energy transitions over long time periods.
Blog
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About Energy Lives!
Energy Lives! Infrastructural Citizenship in Nordic Energy Transitions scrutinizes the conjoined lives of energy and people in the Nordic countries over the past 150 years. The project centers citizens simultaneously as historical actors whose choices continue to form the present and as contemporary actors who live within energy infrastructures shaped by the past. Energy Lives! will generate new knowledge on how democratic engagement and citizen involvement in energy transition processes have impacted the legitimacy and efficiency of such processes. Perspectives as these are critically needed in contemporary political debates and strategies about environmentally and inter- and intra-generationally just green transitions.
Examining Nordic Energy
Energy is produced, distributed, used, and disposed of in large sociotechnical infrastructures that result from historical processes, from choices made and technologies available in the past. Examining Nordic energy transitions from the 1850s until the present through oil refineries, district heating, energy buildings, and afterlives, we bring the participatory nature of transitions into light. To uncover mechanisms of agency, appropriation, and resistance in energy transitions, distributed among people, politics, and infrastructures, we apply the concept of infrastuctural citizenship. Essentially, the energy lives that we study are the outcome of layers upon layers of energy transitions.
Three Work Packages
Working empirically on four cases (oil refineries district heating, energy buildings, and afterlives), Energy Lives! stretches across all five Nordic countries.
Providing the empirical material on energy transition processes while capturing the lifespan of energy transitions from production, distribution, use, and disposal of energy sources and technologies, the four cases reflect on the lives of energies and on the living with energy in different ways which are synthesised in three work packages:
- People Sensing Energy
- Politics Governing Energy
- Infrastructures Siting Energy
Project Team
Department of Cultural Studies and Languages
Department of Cultural Studies and Languages
Affiliated MA Students
Get an overview of students affiliated to the project.
- Thea Gilje, MA student, University of Stavanger
"Fra arbeidsmiljø til bærekraftig utvikling: Utvikling av Statoils forståelse av miljøspørsmål, 1987-2001”