1. Will the ‘subject’ of research into environmental
risk problems please speak up? Narrative
methods and the interpretation of risk
Narratives of Environmental Risk Workshop
(Popular narratives) 8th September 2017
Professor Karen Henwood
School of Social Sciences, Cardiff University
& Cardiff University Understanding Risk Group

2. Stratosphere
(15-50km)
Large scale environmental risk issues…

3. Risk and Everyday Life

4. Talk Approach & Overview
1. Debating & developing risk social science
(and its relation to humanities): reflexivity
about knowledge practices
2. Interpretive risk research: narrative &
methods
3. Two empirical projects involving community
& qualitative longitudinal (QLL) case studies
4. Insights generated through bespoke
methodological & analytical strategies
5. Conclusions: studying risk subjects (& object-
relations) in a material world

5. Epistemic reflexivity in risk research [1]
• Subjective qualities of perceived risks (Slovic and Fischoff – early
psychometric paradigm)
• Working with epistemic tensions – real harm & socially constructed
meaning (Pidgeon et al, 1992; see also Boholm’s (2015) relational
risk theory’s “object of risk” versus “risk object”)
• Risk as locally situated & contextual ie it involves social dynamics
• Lay and expert knowledges and perspectives
• Multiple discourses and framings
• Known as interpretive/socio-cultural risk research (for
overview, see e.g. Pidgeon, Simmons and Henwood, 2006)

6. Epistemic reflexivity in risk research [2]
Openness to uncertainty & foregrounding temporal change and reflexivity
- Empirically investigating changing perceptions & tracking discursive change (QLL research, see
e.g. Capstick et al, 2015 [Environmental Values], on climate change discourses) – but also life
change
- Attending to methodological questions of biography and narrative is one way of
developing/complicating/layering how to approach (diverse forms that can taken by)
subjectivity in risk research (Henwood et al, 2010, [reprinted 2011 in Historical Social
Research; cf Hollway and Jefferson, 1997)
- Arguments associated with the turn to language/text/discourse highly influential in
providing alternative methodological suggestions; choices of methods other than those
established for studying subjectively perceived qualities of risk as discrete data/themes/qualia)
- Narrative form and representation offers more holistic, textured (nuanced, culturally
specific) ways of investigating questions about risk, knowledge and subjectivity, with potential
for opening up interpretive questions and analytic insights

7. Narrative methodology within qualitative social
science (Andrews, Squire and Tamboukou, 2008)
Located in “turn to text/language/discourse”, it offers a choice of
methodology (research strategy) and method to allow for investigation of:
• temporal & causal ordering as features of human sense-making; potentials
of differentiating between lived life & told story
• interweaving of personal and cultural meaning frames; to gain insights into
biographical patterns and social structures
- different and sometimes contradictory layers of meaning & bringing them
into dialogue with one another; offer means of understanding more about
individual and social change

8. Working with narrative methods…:
puts subjects in question
- Not fixed repositories of self-knowledge but (speaking)
subjects capable of negotiating textually nuanced
positions …..
- articulating how knowledge is grounded in lived experiences; expressive of
locally situated knowledges, manifests cultural world views
- adopting identificatory positions (ie fluid & mobile identities) can have creative
potentials, offering ways of reading texts
- cultural tool-kits: drawing upon extended forms of sensing and sense-making
within wider meaning systems (e.g. narrative genres)
- multimodality of meaning making (writing, talking & listening; use of other
sensory channels/media: visual, tactile…)

9. Debating science – various turns
• Multiple waves of epistemological and ontological positioning
Multiple (see e.g. qualitative social science – Handbooks, QRJ)
• Interpretive (e.g. 1970s – symbolic interactionism – focus on
perceptions, meanings, points of view, actions)
• Language/Text/Discourse (post-structuralism)
- critiques of essentialism, crisis of representation, questioning the authorial
voice/issues in writing culture (see e.g. Clifford and Marcus in
anthropology)
- relativity and suspending belief in the real; weak and strong programme in
the sociology of science – see e.g. Woolgar, 1988)
• Material (the qualities/liveness of things/object-related ontology)
• Affective (feelings and the non-representational)
• List not exhaustive (subjectivity, embodiment, relationality,
practices, multimodal sensing & sense-making)

10. The Material Turn/Object related
ontology
• Irreduceability & relationality : versus self sufficient
ecologies of practice or expertise
• The material turn – away from discourse analysis
• See e.g. the development of “object interviewing”
• Our own (Energy Biographies) work has considered
object relations theorising & psychosocial inquiry

11. “Object interviewing” & the broader argument for developing social
science methodology and methods for understanding materials and
material culture
• “there has been little methodological engagement with how qualitative methods
might help us to understand materials and their properties….
• “[The development of such approaches] will help to promote understanding of the
multidimensionality of the world as simultaneously visual, sensual, material and
intangible ….[highlighting the potentials] of using sets of methods (to) make certain
ideas and possibilities ‘present’ [and opening up] conventional qualitative methods
to an interrogation of how they may ‘absent’ material properties” (p2)
• [This means working from two understandings] i) “we need to take seriously the
properties of things and ii) build knowledge production practices for
studying the “entanglements of people, materials, things and
environments” (p3)
(excerpts from S. Woodward, 2016, Qualitative Research, DOI:
10.1177/1468794115589647)

12. Woodward cont’d …. Methods for understanding
what people do with, and say about, things..
• Use ethnographic methods for exploring how things are framed in everyday
life
• Observe what people do with things by using visual methods such as
photography
• Use video capture to explore material practices as interactive and embodied
• Use photo-elicitation techniques in qualitative interviews to explore facets
of the material
• Adopt object elicitation methods as a route into people’s narratives and
memories
• Explore how people provide a narrative context for objects in order to
interrogate the relationships between what people say and what people do
with things

13. …So, although words may not be
enough, they still matter ….
“Whilst words may not be enough in themselves to allow
us to understand material practices they are still part of
how people articulate their relationships to things. Given
how many social science methods centre upon people’s
verbal accounts, it is important to think critically about
what these accounts allow us to understand about
material practices…..[for example] the ways in which
words can evoke the materiality of things.” (Woodward,
2016, p4)

14. Environmental Humanities research - a
bone - or rather bonus - of contention
Although the environmentalist concern of risk theory and (literary)
ecocriticism are not the same, there is shared value in exploring the
implications of risk theory and its narrative articulation
- example of toxic discourse – concern with “textual and visual
representations of exposure to hazardous chemicals”
- reading for the role of realism and hyperbole in local perceptions &
representation
- asking how questioning of global and systems can(not) be effectively
captured in risk narratives
- - over-reliance on representation as reality…the problem of vacuous
symptoms (&) …importance of multiple points of engagement with
technological risk scenarios
(Heise, 2002, in American Literature)

15. Empirical Case Studies
• Nuclear Risk Perceptions & Local Siting
Controversy – x 2 Communities (ESRC SCARR
network 2003-2008)
• Energy Biographies – a study of social change
and risk in the everyday - x 4 community case
sites plus case biographies (EPSRC/ESRC
Energy Communities Joint Venture, 2011-2016)

16. Living with nuclear risk: Studying
intangible meanings
• Living with nuclear risk study (2003-8)
(Henwood et al (2010, 11); Henwood, Sarre, Pidgeon et al (2008)
• Narrative study of environmental risk (Satterfield, 2001)
- risk framing
- biographical & temporal extensions
- reflexivity about lives/place (see also Tulloch & Lupton, 2003)
- personal event narratives (see also Squire, 2008)
- everyday affects
- what is on the margins of awareness becomes researchable

18. SCARR data – an example
• “Now when we where there, when I was there as a young man, we used to
smash it about and it would be dust and throw it at somebody underneath,
and they’d be covered in this dust like flour. Nowadays if there is a chance
of a matchstick head of asbestos about, its contained, sealed, taken away.
You know you can’t work there, you can’t go close to it. In those days, so
who knows what’s in people’s lungs, now waiting to become malignant. ..I
know of two people and I know of one who is dying at the moment you
know he has a year or two to live. From Berkeley Power station and
Oldbury, which is a bit sad and it’s a bit …concerns you a little bit, cos, it
could be you next and it comes about quickly and not a very pleasant death.
So I have had (that) checked out, yeah. And now they’ve recognised it they
didn’t know how bad it was, nobody did, all other industries were exactly
the same, the aircraft industry, ICA, all industries, you know, the
construction industry particularly bad” (Toby Bundock).

19. Analyses & Interpretive Questions
(Parkhill et al, 2010; see also Masco, 2006)
• Ebb & flow of forms of risk awareness
• Interruption by risk events
• Momentary re-framings of power station as a risk issue
Further exploration of risk meanings by attending to
intangibles (humour, irony) (Parkhill et al, 2011)
• Masking & revealing affective states
• Suppressing vulnerabilities
• Enabling communities to negotiate threat

20. Interpretive insights & gaining
analytic perspective for policy
• Not simply acceptance grounded in economic self-
interest or community overdependence on the industry
• Framing as ordinary dominant, but risk tolerability a
fragile state
• National policy relevance – future energy mix
• International (post Fukushima) & carbon reduction
targets

21. Why Interpretive Risk Research (IRR) is up
to the (policy) task
• Ways of getting up close to lived experiences of
risk
• Risk framing & object of study
• Risky technologies, risky knowledges…
• Questioning risk expertise-reflexivity dichotomy

22. Energy Biographies Project (ESRC/EPSRC) 4 year empirical
study of the dynamics of everyday energy use for demand
reduction
• Innovative study design involving intensive methodological and conceptual work to
harness cross disciplinary insights and develop understanding
• Key emphasis on creating data through new ways of enabling talk about everyday
practices would open up spaces for reflection offering possible opportunities for
change
• Harnessing new/interesting kinds of data offered analytic potential
• “Bespoke” approach to data analysis using data and theory to promote exploration
and generate insights
• ie Not an instrumental approach to identifying the specific behaviours and/or
practices that, if changed, will reduce energy consumption

23. The Energy Biographies Project – Study Design
▫ Four ‘community’ sites:
▫ Cardiff (Ely, Peterston), Lammas,
Royal Free Hospital (RFH, London)
▫ QLL biographical, narrative
interviews:
▫ 3 longitudinal interviews (original
group of 74 in first round narrowed
down to 36 for rounds 2 & 3)
▫ 6 months between interviews
▫ Multimodal activities between
interviews

24. Interview 1
Themes: community and context, daily routine, life transitions
Activity 1
Participant-generated photos
Interview 2
Themes: changes since interview 1, discussion of pictures generated in activity 1,
follow up on emergent themes from interview 1
Activity 2
Text-prompted photos
Interview 3
Themes: changes since interview 2, discussion of pictures generated in activity 2
discussion of video clips provided by researcher
Structure of
empirical
phases
More information on each
stage available at
http://energybiographies.org
/our-project/project-design/

25. Participant photography
1. Participant-prompted
photos
▫ Two week period for each
of four themes
▫ Used as basis of
discussion in interview 2
2. SMS-prompted photos
▫ Used as basis of
discussion in interview 3
alongside film clips

26. Practices and meaning
“The capability to ‘go on’
through the flow of largely
routinized social life depends on
forms of practical knowledge,
guided by structural features –
rules and resources – of the
social systems which shape daily
conduct”1
“This constructed world of
predictable relationships is the
context of our actions. But it is
subject to constant revision, and
always more or less vulnerable to
loss, self-doubts, experiences
which make no sense to us.
Then we no longer know
what to do.”2
1. Shove, E., M. Pantzar and M. Watson 2012. The Dynamics of Social Practice. London, SAGE
Publications
2. Marris, P. 1996. The politics of uncertainty: attachment in private and public life. London; New
York, Routledge

27. ‘Heating the outdoors’: practices and
identity
“Cos we love being outside, we just love
that you can you know go, we were
sitting out there one evening I can’t
remember when it would have been, with
friends, and it was like midnight and you
could have a drink outside still and it’s so
lovely here cos it’s so quiet and
everything so but you wouldn’t have been
able to do it without that so or you would
have been freezing. So that’s our kind of,
we know it’s really bad but we’re
still going to use it ”
Lucy, Peterston

28. The lived future: initial interviews
“[…] I do kind of look at the world and see the trends
and think, shit (Laughter), what kind of my life are
my kids going to have? I kind of worry a bit about my
kids’ future and quite what will be available to them,
and their expectations because, you know, they don’t
know all this stuff about houses with coal fires and
coal range cooking and all of that. They have a
very different set of aspirations and
expectations and could be very, very bitter and
betrayed about it if all of that goes.”
(Jeremy, Peterston)

29. “I think it was looking at a kind of increased convenience and it
had just come out of the war hadn’t it? […] And it was I mean
the 50’s was that the hoover, the vote, the automobile you know
all those things like washing machines, dryers that all kind of
came at that time so it was sort of life was going to be easier
because of it.”
(Vanessa, Lammas)
“And I think we lost common sense on things like energy and
material usage, in perhaps the Sixties and Seventies, where the
standard of living went up.”
(Jonathan, Peterston)
Film clips: critiques of futures past

30. Reflections on data analysis (Groves et al, 2016):
Psychosocial theory as a perspective on everyday energy use and practice
change
Analytically distinct elements (e.g. biographies of attachments) and other psychosocial investments
(e.g. shared affective patterning) derive from, but do not tend to be brought into view by, the study of
entanglements of practice as embedded within social relations
Understood psychosocially analytical “elements” are viewed as :
- emergent & dynamic properties of lived experience
- subjectively meaningful and affecting
- temporally and spatially situated, but also potentially cumulative in their effects
• Study of sense making activities concerns biographical patterning of experiences and
connections/attachments in and through time) & how cultural forms shape (socially & temporally
situated) subjectivity
• Need to promote understanding of (dis) embedding of psychosocial elements/subjects within
particular cultural formations (knowledge regimes/discourses)

31. Theoretical engagement with practice theory & substantive findings
from the Energy Biographies Study
• Patterns of practices in and of themselves cannot be viewed as responsible for the continuance of
unsustainability
• Need to go deeper and broader in thinking about people as carriers of practice
• While internal rewards in practice theory are competences afforded by doing something well, or
by performing a practice in accordance with social norms & cultural distinctions, a psychosocial
perspective offers more complex views of the various other elements that lock in, or fail to lock in,
subjects as carriers of particular practices
• Our approach has focussed on difficulties of changing everyday practice (inc work with Carbon
Conversations)
• Can we justifiably claim to have succeeded in opening up potentials for change in everyday
practice? How far has our psychosocial focus opened up possibilities of sustainable change?

32. Conclusions: studying risk subjects (& object-
relations) in a material world
• Assemblages of objects in relationships (material turn) but with psychosocial subjects
brought centre stage (narrative analysis)
• Questions of authorial readings; when does theoretical engagement inform and
disrupt problem focus?
• Methodological work required to situate the problem, maintain problem focussed,
and keep analysis on track
• Gap opened up between the representation and reality of risk is central to
interpretative work, but this is not the same as same as the irreducebility and
relationality of the object related world?
• Reflexive work involves seeing, listening and speaking subjects caught up in (what
can be emotionally demanding) sense making about things that can be invisible and
intangible, either because they are out of the frame, too discomforting to bring to
mind, unnoticed because they are routine, or otherwise hidden in plain site.

33. Selected References
Interpretive Risk Research
• Henwood, K.L. and Pidgeon, N.F. (2016). Interpretive environmental risk research: Affect, discourses and change.
In J. Crighten, Firkins, A.R. and Candlin, C.N. (Eds) Communicating Risk Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan ISBN
9781137478771
Narrative and Risk
• Henwood, Karen; Pidgeon, Nick; Parkhill, Karen & Simmons, Peter (2010). Researching Risk: Narrative,
Biography, Subjectivity [43 paragraphs]. Forum Qualitative Sozialforschung / Forum:Qualitative Social Research,
11(1), Art. 20. Reprinted in Historical Social Research, 2011, 36 (4).
Living with Nuclear Risk
• Parkhill, K.A., Pidgeon, N.F., Henwood, K.L., Simmons, P. and Venables, D. (2010). “From the familiar to the
extraordinary: local residents’ perceptions of risk when living with nuclear power in the UK.” Transactions of the
Institute of British Geographers, NS 35, 39-58.
• Parkhill, K., Henwood, K., Pidgeon, N. and Simmons, P. (2011) “Laughing it off: Humour, affect and emotion work
in communities living with nuclear risk”, British Journal of Sociology, 62 (2) 324-346.
Energy Use and Everyday Life
• Groves, C., Henwood, K., Shirani, F., Butler, C., Parkhill, K. and Pidgeon, N. (2016) “Invested in unsustainability?
On the psychosocial patterning of engagement in practices” Environmental Values 25 (3) 309-328 DOI:
10.3197/096327116X14598445991466. (see also energybiographies.org.uk)

34. Professor Nick Pidgeon
Dr Chris Groves
Dr Fiona Shirani
Dr Erin Roberts
Latterly Energybiographies.org – now Flexis social science