1. Working methodologically in environmental
risk & sustainable energy research: inventive
methods, material culture, & storymaking
Professor Karen Henwood
Other team members: Dr Chris Groves, Dr Fiona Shirani,
Prof Nick Pidgeon
(Social Sciences, Cardiff, UK)
PLM visit, 7th March 2017

2. Our 3 research & public engagement
projects
• Making Sense of Sustainability – Environmental
Futures Dialogue (AHRC Connected
Communities, 2013-14 - an arts-social science
network)
• Energy Biographies (ESRC/EPSRC 2011-16)
(www.energybiographies.org)
• Flexis (Wales European Funding Office
Structural Funds – WEFO, 2015-2021)

3. Social scientific context – working
methodologically …
• Once confidently asserted positions, now
questionable claims:
- (no longer do) methodological choices drive/follow
epistemological & ontological priors
- (no longer do) methods derive solely from the nature of the
questions asked
- A demand for researcher reflexivity, which can take idealised or
overly simplified forms

4. Interpretivist social science
Investigates social (and psychosocial) phenomena:
• To understand their emergent, contextualised and constructed/embedded
meanings (and affect), rather than assuming these are self-evident to an
‘objective’ observer
• i.e. problematises deep internalisation that issues of epistemology and
ontology don’t even arise
Makes available approaches & methods for investigating such meanings &
affects
• i.e. talk and text methods
• includes methods for making intangible meanings visible

5. Socio-cultural perspective
A methodological lens for:
- paying attention to how local and wider cultural
meanings play a role in constructing knowledge and
reality
- focussing on how wider discourses play a role in
meaning-making and subject formation
- brings a particular sensibility to investigating everyday
sense-making

6. In qualitative social science, shifting questions guide
knowledge framing ……
• Without interpretivism, issues of epistemology and ontology do not
arise, privileging silence and inattention (the positivist default)
• Interpretivism’s commitment to an intersubjective reality remains a
reasonable ontological claim
• However, interpretive lenses (theory/discourses) may not get at the
material dimension of social life
• How to make interpretivist ways of working more
accessible/comprehensible to any and all interested researchers?

7. Science & the shift to participatory culture
• Modelling/mapping participatory methods to avoid
dialogic and deficit models – towards "open-ended ecologies
of participation” (Chilvers & Kearns, Eds, 2016)
• Invitation to reflexivity about objects and models of research within
wider participatory culture
• Not the sole concern guiding how we practice our craft, but
behaviour change is neither the deliberative nor reflective object in
our EB's and Flexis work)
• Our own research-public engagement model has its own
methodological dynamics/knowledge-making aesthetic

8. Opening up methodological practices & storymaking
through collaborations involving social science & the arts?
• Traditional division of labour:
researchers produce knowledge, arts
helps communicate it
• Alternative model: arts practitioners
& researchers as knowledge
intermediaries
Peat Leith and Frank Vanclay (2015) “Translating science to benefit diverse publics:
engagement pathways for linking climate risk, uncertainty and agricultural identities”.
Science Technology and Human Values (40(6) 939-964

9. Four themes
Complex
subjectivity
• Emotion/
affect
• Attachment
• Biography
Obliquity
• Creating
conversations
• ‘Questioning’
situations
Reflexivity
• Reflecting on
assumptions
• Performing
methods
Conviviality
• ‘secure’ yet
creative
spaces
• openness

10. Complex
subjectivity
• The basis of our approach
• Human beings do not only make sense of their worlds by cognitive
processing of information
• E.g. emotional attachment rooted in bodily engagement
Embodi-
ment
Emotion
Cognition Imagination

11. Obliquity
• On difficult topics like –
sustainability, the future,
climate change
• But also engaging more
aspects of the ways in which
we experience the world
▫ Emotions
▫ Aesthetics
▫ Embodiment
• Using objects and artefacts to
create situations that are
‘questioning’

12. Conviviality
• Ivan Illich, Tools for Conviviality (1973)
▫ ‘autonomous and creative intercourse
among persons, and
the intercourse of
persons with their
environment’
▫ ‘individual freedom
realized in personal
interdependence
• World cafes: secure spaces
/creative spaces

13. Reflexivity
• Social science (qual or quant) does not just
discover data
• It creates situations in which data are
generated
• Qual social science: opportunities for sense
making
• Situations in which methods and
subjectivities are performed

14. Obliquity and creating data
• Environmental Futures Dialogue
project – how to talk about big, difficult
issues like sustainability?
• Worked with arts colleagues to create
spaces, situations and objects to think
with (Heim, 2004)
• The importance of ‘cultural probes’ -
using material objects and obliquely-
related tasks
• Convivial spaces alive to the
unexpected
• Sought to inspire stories, enhancing
data elicitation
Examples of cultural probes

15. Energy Biographies study (EBs)…
• Energy policy and research all
about making stories –stories of
big and small transitions
• EBs approach: asks ‘can
biographical stories tell us about
the complexities of change?’ &
makes visible the intangibility of
energy usage in everyday life?
• 3 waves of multimodal
engagement with participants
over one year (2012-3)
▫ Participant photography of
everyday energy use
▫ Viewing films of energy futures
and the everyday

16. EB’s design and methodology …
• Shirani, F., Parkhill, K., Butler, C., Groves, C., Pidgeon,
N. and Henwood, K. (2016) Asking about the future:
Methodological insights from energy biographies,
International Journal of Social Research Methodologies,
.19 (4) 429-444 DOI: 10.1080/13645579.2015.1029208
• Henwood, K., Shirani, F. and Groves, C.(in press). Using
photographs in interviews: When we lack the words to
say what practice means. To appear in U. Flick (ed) The
Sage Handbook of Qualitative Data Collection London:
Sage

17. 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.

18. Activity 2 – text-prompted photos
15 years, I think that I would really like to get more solar heating or more
electricity from PV panels and things like that. Or I’m very keen to get an
electric car and maybe in five years time that might already be a possibility
but I would sort of say maybe in ten to fifteen years time that it’s a lot
more a possibility than now. Maybe my needs would have changed a little
but by then, my son would probably be driving so maybe we only need it as
a family maybe only have you know a petrol car and maybe then a little
electric car for me and my wife to sort of go around for local trips or
something like that … Maybe by then the kind of car hire you can sort of do
by you know Sit Car or Street Car or something where you hire them by the
hour if and when you need them so you have Car Club membership maybe
that is more widespread in ten, 15 years time so there may be some
changes the way we sort of think. So I’m hoping to have our house the
energy consumption of the house reduced by a lot. (Dennis)

19. • “they were coming from a time of
war and deprivation and they had in
the beginning of the 20th century there
was a lot of economic problems so
all this is a part of the past and
we’re looking into the future which
is the opposite. So it’s abundance, it’s an
easy life, not easy life in bad way but in a
good way that you don’t have to do a lot
of chores and you can enjoy your life
more” Suzanna
“ if our population grows so much
that the land shrinks that much that
we really can’t produce enough food
maybe we’ll have to look at something on
the sea you know islands of growth or
something like this without any soil or
anything like that so could be a bit like out
of the box that we might need in 50
years time to go back to” Dennis
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

20. Images
• What are the first words that come to mind in
looking at these images?
• Where would you locate the images temporally? (i.e.
are they about the past, present or future?)
• What issues relating to sustainability emerge for you
from these images?
• Does having the accompanying text change the way
you think about the image?

21. http://energybiographies.org/energy-stories-gallery/

22. A Sense of
Energy
(Hackney Wick/The
Senedd, Cardiff Bay,
June & October 2014)

23. Re-using the exhibits
• ‘Monster Confidence’ event aimed at encouraging young women
into STEM organised by Stemettes
Photos courtesy of Stemettes

24. Flexis (Flexible,
Integrated Energy
Systems)
• Engineering-social science research consortium in
Wales
• Demonstrator sites in Port Talbot, centring on Tata
Steel, and surrounding region
• Revisiting “stories of change” to understand
potential social impacts of energy system transitions
• Socio-technical focus – expert imaginaries and
effects of interventions in everyday homes, plus
siting/risk controversies

25. Flexis & obliquity
• Planning range of
multimodal
storymaking
research strategies
• First example:
expert interviews
• Eliciting personal
as well as
professional
perspectives on
the future

26. Final remarks: storymaking & questions for
social science & the arts
1. How to bring together social science & arts to stage
‘convivial’ research encounters to create knowledge?
2. Can their collaborative work be developed to enliven
engagement with research?
3. What role does obliquity play in making it possible to tell
‘difficult’ stories?
4. How can the arts bring materiality into social science,
making tangible the intangible (e.g. everyday life and its
dependencies, assumptions about the future?)

27. To read end of award report:
• http://energybiographies.org/newsblog/energy-
biographies-final-report-available/