This document announces a two-day workshop on developing capacity in multimodal research, community engagement, and energy demand reduction. The workshop aims to promote methodological innovation using multimodal data, enhance research-user engagement, and increase multimodal research capabilities among projects related to sustainable communities and energy demand reduction. Activities will include talks, panels, discussions, and workshops to creatively and analytically work with multimodal data and discuss multimodality and public engagement. The workshop intends to boost participants' research insights and transfer gains to other communities, with plans to develop an interactive mobile exhibition showcasing work across projects.

1. Developing Capacity in Multimodal Research,
Community Engagement and Energy Demand
Reduction, July 4-5th
2013, Cardiff City Hall

2. Welcome & Background to Workshop
• Energy & Communities (E&C) Joint
Venture (ESRC/EPSRC) (2010-2015)
• strategic objective: to make a significant
contribution to research on energy
demand reduction as part of Energy
Research Programme
• research to involve stakeholder
engagement to inform energy reduction at
community level

3. Why develop capacity in multimodal
research (MR)?
1. A field of innovative methodological development
in the social sciences: with potential to enhance
research-user engagement in the field of
sustainable energy & energy demand reduction
2. Continuation of key legacies; MR as developed by
QUALITI and Ethnography in the Digital Age
(Cardiff University) – by taking account of the
more complex multi-modality of meaning that is
afforded when working with assemblages of talk,
text, images (photographic and video) and sound

4. Why develop capacity in
multimodal research (MR)?
3. Two E&C teams with complementary multi-modal methodological
strengths:
 Goldsmiths ‘sustainability innovation and community co-design’– engaging
participants through visual, aural, oneiric, emotional & physical affordances of
objects, artifacts and co-production events
 Cardiff ‘Energy Biographies’ - innovative visual, temporal /qualitative longitudinal &
narrative methods for engaging people in their routine uses of energy
- Engaging creatively with multiple forms of qualitative data
- Enhancing principles and practices of qualitative data analysis
- Opening up spaces for reflection outside regulatory imperatives of demand
reduction

5. A creative alliance of social scientists
with the arts & humanities?
• Creative design, performance arts scholarship, social studies of science
& technology
• AHRC network (Henwood & Lavery, 2013-14) “making sense of
sustainability (including sustainable energy) through environmental
futures dialogue: An arts & social sciences collaboration”
www.cardiff.ac.uk/socsi/environmental-futures
• Compositional strategies, research as writing, narrative
practice/meaning-making, making sensorial-worldly connections
• Capacious research – accommodating imagination & the “as yet
undefined ontological object”

6. Aims of the 2-day workshop
1. Promote methodological development &
innovation in multimodal research
2. Use MR to consider ways to enhance research-user
engagement
3. Increase MR capability among researchers and
ongoing projects concerned with sustainable
communities, low carbon transitions and energy
demand reduction

7. Activities over the 2 days….
• Format involves invited talks, panel & plenary
discussions, & workshops in world café style
• Day one – working creatively and analytically with
multi-modal data (MMD)
• Day two – multimodality and public engagement

8. As a result of the workshop activities, we should
be in a better position to ….
• Significantly boost the creative capacity & insights of attendees & projects in
ways not initially accommodated within their original awards
• Transfer gains made to other researcher, policy & practitioner communities
– through demonstrating increased MR capacities within our respective
dissemination events & publications
• Key stimulus (at the workshop) - take forward plans for devising a mobile
exhibition of work conducted across E&C projects, to involve drawing
together a set of carefully designed, interactive and site based digital
resources & productions
• Some will be pre-existing while others may be developed as a result of the
collaborations started at the workshop

9. Energy Biographies
Karen Henwood
Catherine Butler
Karen Parkhill
Nick Pidgeon
Fiona Shirani
www.energybiographies.org

10. Energy Biographies
Karen Henwood
Catherine Butler
Karen Parkhill
Nick Pidgeon
Fiona Shirani
www.energybiographies.org