1. Energy Practices and Psychosocial Research: The Energy
Biographies Study
Presentation at Birkbeck College, 24th
October, 2015 “Psychosocial research on human engagement
with climate change”
Professor Karen Henwood
Cardiff School of Social Sciences & energy biographies team (www.energybiographies.org)

2. Energy Biographies (ESRC/EPSRC 2011-15)
• 4 year empirical study of the dynamics of everyday energy use for demand reduction
• Key assumption – current levels of energy use are unsustainable – but it is far from
obvious how to respond to this individually or collectively – hence the need to open
up spaces for reflection offering possible opportunities for change
• Innovative study design to harness cross disciplinary insights and develop
understanding (so intensive methodological and analytical work)
• Identifying the specific behaviours and/or practices that, if changed, will reduce
energy consumption is NOT our focus.
• Rather new/interesting kinds of data - offering analytic potential
• “Bespoke” approach to data analysis using data and theory to promote exploration
and generate insights
• Practice theory and psychosocial research : resources for argumentation - as ‘critical
friends’

3. Energy Biographies: Multiple
Orienting Lenses

4. Practice Theory and Psychosocial Concerns
Practice Theory Psychosocial concerns
• Social theory/STS/sociology of
everyday practice
• Draws on theoretical work on
social practices (Reckwitz, 2002,
Schatzki, 1996)
• Wider energy systems made up of
interlocking elements of practice
(materials, knowledge, meaning)
• Change in one element provokes
change in other elements & the
practice itself (Shove et al, 2012)
• Addresses questions of individual
agency as emergent property of
particular sets of practices
• Brings into focus analytically distinct foci
(elements) to behaviours & practice theory:
• - biographically constituted attachments,
investments
• - fragmented, multiple, contradictory,
identities- reflecting self-other relations
(difference & connection)
• - identifications, introjected cultural ideals;
splitting, projection
• - shared meanings, commitments, beliefs &
values, world-views
• - what is not expressed/unspoken/difficult
to put into words - the non-cognitive -
feelings, emotions, affect (eg anxiety,
shame, loss)
• - libidinal forces – wishes, wants and
desires
• - intangible aspects of subjectivity –but
gaining meaning through sense-making &
take up of subject positions, as part of
cultural discourses

5. Click to add title
• Longitudinal Biographical Interviews
▫ Four sites: Ely, Peterston (Cardiff),
Lammas (West Wales), Royal Free
Hospital (London)
▫ 3 longitudinal interviews (original
group of 74 in first round narrowed
down to 36 for rounds 2 & 3)
▫ Multimedia component
▫ 6 months between interviews
EB’s Study Design
See: www.energybiographies.org
Royal Free Hospital,
London
Lammas, West Wales

6. Case Sites
www.energybiographies.org

7. 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/

8. Energy biographies’ as a QLL study: a
temporal and biographical approach
• QLL facilitates an exploration of change through time
and an accumulation of qualitative data, which provides
depth and detail
• How past experiences and anticipated futures come to
have an impact – both enabling & constraining – on
people’s present lives, routines and habits
• Individual biographical accounts can
• shed light on wider social trends and
changes

9. Wave 1 interviews – themes
1. Community and Context
• Talk through how they came to live in their current
home/area, how they characterise their community(s)
• Connections – e.g. who they live with/is in their family
• Discussion points specific to the particular case area
2. Daily routine
• Talk through in detail to get an understanding of energy
use and practices
• Discuss how this varies for atypical times/events
e.g. Christmas, weekends
3. Life transitions
• What have been the key events/turning points that have
resulted in a lifestyle change?
• How might lifestyles and transitions differ for future
generations?

10. Activity 1 – participant-generated photos
1. Activity 1 – participant-generated photos
• Participants were asked to take photographs of things they felt were related to
energy use around four themes
• Two week period for each theme. Participants were sent texts to remind them
of the theme
• Pictures then formed the basis for discussion in interview 2
Jack: That’s a tumble dryer timer so you can control the heat and the time, I’m very
aware of using the tumble dryer, I don’t use it very often, in fact just lately I’ve
hardly used it at all … I just put the stuff over the clothes horse and then the ambient
temperature of the house dries the clothes or I put them outside on the line and I
love pegging washing out, it’s one of my favourite things …
Int: And what is it about pegging washing out?
Jack: I don’t know but my mum has it so maybe it’s something I’ve picked up off her
… just the ease, the ease and the ability to just have such an easy, to create clean
washing is such a hard task and it’s just fantastic to do it, maybe, maybe in the
distant past my relatives were in domestic service and had to struggle, washing is a
real struggle if you don’t have modern gadgets so every time I do it I really
appreciate it.

11. Wave 2 interviews - themes
Example:
There are a few themes emerging from the first interviews which I would like to
ask your views on:
Wasting energy – what is seen as wasteful? Is it only seen as wasteful in a
financial sense? Have you noticed anything around the home/workplace/out
and about that you consider wasteful? Is there anything you would do to
change this?
Second interview – a detailed focus on everyday energy use
• Discussion of important life changes since interview 1
• Exploring everyday energy use through participant-
generated photographs
• Following up emerging themes from interview 1: e.g. waste,
frugality and guilt

12. Activity 2 – text-prompted photos
Activity 2 – text-prompted photos
• Text messages sent to participants at 10 intervals between
August-November 2012 asking them to take a picture of
what they were doing at the time
• From these pictures we created photo narratives, to be
discussed with participants in interview 3

13. Wave 3 interviews - themes
Third interview – looking to energy futures
• Discussion of important life changes since interview 2
• Exploring everyday routines through text-prompted
photos and using these to facilitate discussions of pasts
and futures
• Using videos to discuss visions of the future
Example:
Since last time we spoke (in August) have you experienced any
changes/anything happened that has led to change in your life? (Prompt
impact for lifestyle changes) Have there been any alterations in your day-to-
day life/routine? (Follow up on specific issues from interview 1/2). Has this
resulted in any changes to your energy use?

14. Activity 3 - videos
Activity 3 – video clips
• During interview 3 participants are shown clips from a 1950s and 2010s version
of what a home of the future might look like
• The clips facilitate talk about the future, which can otherwise be difficult to
discuss

15. Eb’s data –enhancing reflections on everyday
energy use (practices)
• “Right more gadgets. TV,
PVR, video player, digi box,
daughter using laptop whilst
watching television. Yeah just
the penetration of electronics
into our lives which kind of we
all know but when you actually
put the spotlight on and take
some photographs it just
brings the impact up.
• (Jeremy, 62, Cardiff)

16. Eb’s data –enhancing reflections on everyday
energy use (practices)
“it gives this sense that you’re in an
open space so its airy, its well lit and
you can see outside, it feels bigger so I
think this is great. And it saves them a
lot of energy consumption as well
because they, I noticed that they do
have artificial lights but they’d need to
use a lot more if instead of glass panels
they had brick walls. But on the other
side I don’t know how they keep the
insulation with the glass, I don’t know
how good all these windows are for
insulation so it might be that they’re
saving on one side but spending a lot
on the other side.
(Suzanna, 34,

17. Investing in Unsustainability: On the Psychosocial
Patterning of Engagement in Practices
(Environmental Values, in press)
Transitioning towards socio-environmental sustainability
involves practice change
Understanding how potential for practice change is opened
up or obstructed
Eb’s analysis - one way of elucidating this potential – by
explaining biographical patterning of investments in our
ways of living unsustainably

18. Data Extract 1 – Heating the Outdoors
(Lucy, Peterson SuperEly)
• … we do love our patio heater when it’s a sunny evening but it gets a
bit cold and dark and you can sit out and they’re like probably the
worst things aren’t they? But we love it well we only use it about
five times a year so it’s OK.
• Cos we love being outside, we just love that you can you know go, we
were sitting out there one evening … 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.

19. Analytic narrative
• Psycho-biographical connection to practice :
• - involves renewal of identity tied to family connections
• - desire for ideal home – centring on surroundings and possibilities
afforded for hosting family and friends
• Participation in the practice derives from internal rewards
contributed to identity - constituted by emotional investments & by
evaluations of how life is going for them and for people who matter
to them (relational rewards)
• Expansion into psychosocial – ie emotional & symbolic - space : one
where engagement in unsustainable practice nonetheless plays a
sustaining role

20. Data Extract 2 – Cycling to Work (Sara,
London – Royal Free)
• So I cycle there and back…. when my daughter was young I had a seat on
the back for her and cycled as much as I could…. It’s just quicker to get to
work, it’s so much quicker…. So it was convenience as well and obviously I
wanted to try and get fit and yes, it just seemed like, they’ve introduced an
underground sort of cage where you use your pass to get in. So it’s quite a
secure bike lock up. So once I knew they had that I was more inclined to…
And my mum always cycled when I was young, I always remember being on
the back of her bike in Dublin. So yes, and when we lived in the countryside
in Ireland, I cycled to school two miles each way because there were no
buses. So yes, it’s just something that’s always been there.
• I cycled to Hampstead yeah in my old job which was a lot nicer because you
cycle through Hampstead Heath but here it’s Central London, it’s Euston,
it’s really really busy and I’m quite scared about because we don’t have
decent cycle lanes at all. So just have to be really careful.

21. Analytic narrative
• Cycling has practical advantages for commuting - but deeper value
lies in connecting it to her environment, especially the community
in which she lives, her mother, connections between home &
workplace
• Internal rewards come from attachment to practice and to objects
with shared/community meaning and private meanings
• Such meanings are tangibly linked through biographical narrative to
negotiating issues of vulnerability, identity and self-efficacy
• Cycling’s psychosocial value derives from attachments to practices
that, even while going through transitions, can afford connection
and relational rewards

22. Extract 3 – Driving Souped Up Old Cars
(Ronald, Peterson)
•I would have no wish to rally in a modern in a modern car, whichever engine it was
propelled by, no wish at all. It would be quite good fun to drive balls out in the most
recent Mini, just to see what it was like through a forest, I would enjoy that yes please! …
but that would be a novelty; it wouldn't be what turns me on. What turns me on is a
piece of old kit that you've put together and you've developed and, you know, the cars I
have are not just reconstructed but I've developed them as you would have developed
them from original. They are not an original but they do stuff that they couldn't do when
they were first built. ... That's the appeal for me; you've done this, you've put it together,
you and your chum, its adventure, more than motorsport in a sense … the adventure bit
is every much as important as the mechanical bit but both are important…. so I wouldn't
want to do that in a battery-powered car or a hydrogen car or a modern car, wouldn't
want to do it and it wouldn't turn me on

23. Analytic Narrative
• Driving, central to identity, centring on cars as specific
material objects
• Car-care an activity of comradeship, autonomy
connected with risk experience
• Oil depleted/imagined future unable to support shared
meanings of adventure – an internal reward of
participation in risk practice
• Imaginatively, loss of attachment through leisure driving
is anticipated for multiple generations

24. Extract 4 – Home freezing (Lucy, Peterson
SuperEly)
• I think they’re necessary but I think we’re all a bit obsessed, like I
think when people have two freezers like my mother-in-law has a
chest freezer and she doesn’t know what half the stuff in there is and
I was talking about this with a friend and they said they cleared out
their grandmother’s freezer once with her and there were things that
had been in there for like eight years that she’s like made and dated,
… I think it also results in a way of wasting more food because you
go oh I’ll just shove it in the freezer but actually you never end up
using it or you end up chucking it out because it’s been in there too
long or whatever so. I think it’s a necessary thing that we’ve taken,
we’ve become a bit over the top obsessed with you know.

25. Analytic narrative
• Food freezing practices allows management of
conflicting time pressures, but unspoken valuing of
household security hinted at as constitutive of identity
• Early biographical experiences made sense of home
freezers as enabling ‘escape’ from known times of
generational hardship – giving emotional & symbolic &
identity significance to participation in batch cooking &
quick meals
• Obsession defensively evokes seeking security through
practice & its inherently unsustainable dynamic –
increasing waste & energy use to maintain full freezers

26. 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) need
to be better integrated into social scientifific inquiries
The embeddedness of practices/ensembles within ‘wider’ social
relations, understood psychosocially, can be considered as emergent &
dynamic properties of lived experience, situated in time and place
Sense making activities (e.g. about biographical patterning of
experiences and connections/attachments in and through time)
contribute to cultural shaping of forms of subjectivity
Better equips us to understand embedding of psychosocial
elements/subjects within particular cultural formations (knowledge
regimes/discourses) in specific ways?

27. Theorising the Practice-Psychosocial
Interface in the Energy Biographies Study
• Patterns of practices in and of themselves cannot be viewed as responsible for the
continuance of unsustainability; getting things done is important in going on living
but only one part of practical, embodied consciousness – multiple forms make up the
fabric of everyday life
• Need to go deeper and broader in thinking about people as carriers of practice: & ask
is it enough to theorise becoming recruited to such practices, remaining loyal to – or
defecting from practices, as a result of the internal rewards from participation in
practice
• Internal rewards in practice theory are competences afforded by doing something
well, or by performing a practice in accordance with social norms & cultural
distinctions
• But, a psychosocial perspective offers complex views of the various other elements
that lock in, or fail to lock in, subjects as carriers of particular practices – and opens
up possibilities of change in and through time

29. Over-optimism of policy narrative about
change potential afforded by moments of
lifecourse transition
• Transformative moments – viewed in policy as opportunities for intervention, BUT
they involve experiences and effects of unresolved transitions
• Thicker analysis required of lifecourse disruption - liminal and liminoid identity
forms of such transitions
• 3 x Eb’s analysis of personal narratives of change : disavowal, active silencing &
acknowledgement
• Cultural constraints of dominant (e.g. linear progress) narrative genre & need for
‘reintegration’ of identities on the other side of transition
• Analysis centred on study participants different ways of living with –ivity

30. Energy Biographies – Concluding remarks
• Reflecting on the usually hidden dynamic ways of using energy in everyday
life has required methodological innovation
• Focus and attention has been directed at issues generally not regarded as
important in contemporary studies of energy demand & change trajectories
(psychosocial investments)
• Changes in energy use and demand are unlikely to be possible if they create
concerns about everyday dependences on energy and a resultant sense of
not being able to live a worthwhile life (LAWL)
• LAWL means keeping alive valued identities, desires and sustaining
relationships with others
• Also important are mediations via emotional investments in material
objects, devices, everyday practices; entanglements with wider
infrastructure
• But is studying the ‘emotional labour of meaning making’ still
in its infancy?

31. There is effort involved when people are seeking to work out:
• what is the best thing to do?
• how to resolve moral tensions over long-established and/or
contemporary values?
•
• how difficult it can be to think about a longer-term future
based on contemporary ideals of what counts as a life worth
living?
• how to resolve personal uncertainties magnified during key
life-course transitions?
Energy Biographies – Researchfish “Key Findings”
www.energybiographies.org

32. EB’s Psychosocial Publications
• Groves, C., Henwood, K., Shirani, F., Butler, C., Parkhill, K. and
Pidgeon, N. (2015) “Invested in unsustainability? On the
psychosocial patterning of engagement in practices” Environmental
Values . For pre-publication copy go to
http://www.erica.demon.co.uk/EV/EVpapers.html
• Groves. C., Henwood, K., Shirani, F., Butler, C., Parkhill, K., and
Pidgeon, N. “Energy biographies: narrative genres, lifecourse
transitions and practice change”, Science, Technology and Human
Values For pre-publication copy go to
http://sth.sagepub.com/content/early/2015/10/06/016224391560
9116.refs

33. Eb’s Other Publications – Accepted & In
press
•Parkhill, K., Shirani, F., Butler, C., Groves, C., Henwood, K. and Pidgeon, N. (in press) “We are a community [but] it
takes a certain amount of energy? Exploring shared visions, social action and resilience in place-based community-led
initiatives. Environmental Science and Policy.
•Shirani, F., Butler, C., Groves. C., Parkhill, K., Henwood, K. and Pidgeon, N. (in press) “Living in the future?
Environmental concerns, parenting and low-impact lifestyles”. Handbook of Childhood Geographies, Springer
(accepted January, 2015).
•Shirani, F., Parkhill, K., Butler, C., Groves, C., Pidgeon, N .and Henwood, K. (2015) “Asking about the future:
Methodological insights from energy biographies”, International Journal of Social Research Methodologies.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13645579.2015.1029208
•Shirani,F., Butler, C., Henwood, K., Parkhill, K. & Pidgeon, N. (2014) “‘I’m not a tree hugger, I’m just like you’:
changing perceptions of sustainable lifestyles”, Environmental Politics, DOI: 10.1080/09644016.2014.959247
•Butler, C., Parkhill, K., Shirani, F., Henwood, K. and Pidgeon, N. (2014) “Examining the dynamics of energy demand
through a biographical Lens”, Nature and Culture, 9(2), 164-182.

34. Energybiographies.org
Other team Members: Professor Nick Pidgeon, Dr
Chris Groves & Dr Fiona Shirani (Cardiff)
Dr Karen Parkhill (now York)
Dr Catherine Butler (now Exeter)

35. henwoodk@Cardiff.ac.uk