Wilcox+Abstracts+and+Panels

3 Abstracts + Panel Descriptions James Wilcox, Spring 2013

1. Lively Infrastructures: Care, Excess, and Aesthetics on and off the Grid

So-called “smart grid” and advanced demand response technologies have been touted as routes to increased energy efficiency, absolute energy use reductions, and cleaner energy generation through better management of intermittent renewable resources. Overlooked in such discourses are the aesthetic/political modes of engagement offered by various demand response technologies. This paper draws on ethnographic observations and discourse analysis of policy documents to ask: What new pleasures and obligations of care do these emerging infrastructures afford? This case will be used to introduce the concept of “lively infrastructures” and offer some provisional generalizations that extend beyond energy systems.

Panel: New Materialisms: What is to be Done?

A decade of “new materialist” scholarship has sought to reorient the social sciences and political thought toward “things themselves.” This anti-anthropocentric focus on the political valences of nonhuman otherness outside of charismatic forms of “life” has valorized the agentive properties of food, bacteria, metal, and garbage, among other entities. This panel seeks to animate new materialist theory with some much needed praxis by posing the Tolstoyan question. We invite contributions that examine the pragmatic ethico-political dimensions of a world inhabited by “vibrant matter.”

2. Energy Demand Projections and their Others: Adventures in Public Policy Epistemologies

Panel: Policy Cultures

3. Reimagining Energy Interventions: Discourses, Practices, Policies

The imperative to reduce energy use across all sectors of society is only growing more urgent as the costs to human and environmental health and well being from climate change, fuel extraction, and energy system operation increase. Yet U.S. per capita energy use continues to remain extremely high—nearly five times the world average—even as demand for energy increases around the globe (U.S. EIA 2011). An increasing number of relatively well-supported policy initiatives have been successful at keeping overall residential energy use levels from rising over the past thirty years, however meaningful reductions have also proven elusive (U.S. EIA 2012). The aim of this study is to understand why collective efforts to achieve significant reductions in residential energy use return only marginal, temporary results. Specifically, I am interested in how interventions aimed at influencing everyday energy use, initiated by institutions such as government agencies, advocacy organizations, and design firms, impact modes of user engagement with energy systems. To answer this question, I will use multi-sited ethnography and textual analysis of policy documents to interpret institutional energy use interventions from multiple perspectives, while keeping the everyday practices that drive energy demand at the core of the analysis. In opening the “black box” of residential energy demand and its apparent obduracy, this study further develops theories of everyday sociotechnical change while offering designers of conventional and unconventional interventions empirically-based analysis and recommendations.

Panel: Everyday Sociotechnical Practices in Transition