New international research project to explore energy transitions in the Nordic region over the past 150 years. The project was awarded funding from NordForsk’s 'Green Transition' call and runs from October 2024 to March 2028.
Melina Antonia Buns has received funding from NordForsk for the international project Energy Lives! Infrastructural Citizenship in Nordic Energy Transitions which investigates people’s relationships with energy transitions in the Nordic region over the past 150 years.
The double meaning of Energy Lives! in the title is by choice, explains project leader Melina Antonia Buns, associate professor of history at UiS: “Energies and energy carriers have a life in themselves, but humans also live with and through these energies. It is those connections that we aim to study in this project.”
Approaching energy transitions and citizens by focusing on lived experiences, politics, and infrastructures, the project explores how historical processes and decisions continue to shape contemporary debates. The research team seeks to highlight the agency of people in energy transitions, understanding them as citizens, consumers, and workers.
In Energy Lives!, the University of Stavanger collaborates with Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden and Aarhus University in Denmark. The project also counts Finland and Iceland among its case studies which explore oil refineries, district heating, energy buildings, and transformative afterlives.
The Nordic scope of Energy Lives! and the focus on collaboration speaks directly to NordForsk’s emphasis on added Nordic value. As part of NordForsk’s Green Transition call, Energy Lives! is one of ten research projects that have been selected for funding and the only historical among social scientific research projects.
Co-director of the Greenhouse Center for Environmental Humanities and member of the research team Finn Arne Jørgensen is excited about the new project and the recognition by NordForsk of the urgent need for humanities research. "This grant recognises the importance of historical and humanities research for current challenges. Energy transitions are not only technological transitions, but are also socio-cultural transitions. With our focus on the citizen, we aim to highlight exactly this.” On 11 and 12 November 2024, the project members met in Stavanger for a kick-off meeting and to plan the activities of the first year. "Energy Lives! is designed as a collaborative project in which we can learn from each other and together," explains Buns. "Each year the partners will organise public events, academic workshops, and project excursions across the Nordic region." In the second half of March 2025, the partners will organise the first of in total three Infrastructural Citizen Weeks in Stavanger, Aarhus, and Gothenburg.