Arguments about how to bring about change in contemporary ways of living and to address intractable climate and related risk issues are not uncontroversial: it is not so obvious how to take forward our individual and collective efforts to live more sustainably. The position we have adopted on the energy biographies research project (www.energybiographies.org) is that any such change needs to be liveable change for the humans currently alive on this planet. Our ways of working towards this, therefore, have involved seeking to understand the often highly embedded nature of routine, everyday energy practices which frequently underpin difficulties in changing them, as well as opening up reflective spaces for thinking about possibilities for change. The presentation will focus on efforts by the energy biographies research team to conduct methodologically innovative research involving a combination of narrative, multi-modal, and qualitative longitudinal data collection and analysis methods that are suited to investigating patterns of everyday energy usage and which offer rich research resources for the interpretation and analysis of empirical data. Drawing directly on some of our published papers (“Invested in unsustainability?: On The Psychosocial Patterning of Engagement in Practices” (Environmental Values, 2015) and “Energy biographies: narrative genres, lifecourse transitions and practice change” (Science, Technology and Human Values, 2015), the presentation of research will suggest that patterns of practices in and of themselves cannot be viewed as responsible for the continuance of unsustainability, and that there is also a need to go deeper and broader in thinking about how people become participants in such practices. For social practice theorists, attention needs to be paid to internal rewards – such as feelings of competence afforded by doing something well, as well as the (better known) social rewards that come from performing a practice in ways that can bestow social distinction. A psychosocial perspective can offer more 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 environmental subjectivities in and through time.

Co-Sponsors: Bren School for Environmental Science & Management, Environmental Humanities Initiative