Disruption is Normal: Blackouts, Breakdowns and the Elasticity of Everyday Life

Trentmann, Frank

doi:10.5040/9781474215862-ch-004

Cited by 51 publications

(51 citation statements)

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“…Chappells et al, 2011;Trentmann, 2009). Our assumption was that the music festival would likely entail a relatively drastic reconfiguration of the personal washing practices that attendees were otherwise unthinkingly reproducing.…”

Section: Studying the Contextual Dependence Of Resource Consuming Conmentioning

confidence: 99%

Should there be more showers at the summer music festival? Studying the contextual dependence of resource consuming conventions and lessons for sustainable tourism

Hitchings¹,

Browne

Jack

2017

Journal of Sustainable Tourism

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Section: Studying the Contextual Dependence Of Resource Consuming Conmentioning

confidence: 99%

Should there be more showers at the summer music festival? Studying the contextual dependence of resource consuming conventions and lessons for sustainable tourism

Hitchings¹,

Browne

Jack

2017

Journal of Sustainable Tourism

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“…By separately exploring the elements that constitute a practice; meanings (our engagements and beliefs), materials (products, technologies), and competences (embodied skills, knowledge), we identify important but often unspoken aspects of how households cope with extensive blackouts. By further exploring the interplay between these elements, we gain a deeper understanding of their type and level of preparedness; to what degree households are able to absorb disruption while still carrying on with their daily lives (Trentmann, ). Here, households are understood not as mere recipients of support during blackouts, but as active agents that work through an event by activating and mobilising competences and materials, and construct and reconstruct meanings about blackouts.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Coping with blackouts: A practice theory approach to household preparedness

Heidenstrøm

Kvarnlöf

2017

Contingencies & Crisis Mgmt

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The article focuses on how rural households cope with blackouts caused by winter storms. We approach household preparedness using a practice theory perspective, and argue that preparedness is mundanely preformed as part of everyday practices. The data material consists of at home visits to 14 households from Norway and Sweden. The results demonstrate that households cope with blackouts by activating and mobilising competences, meanings and materials belonging to different practices, and that this is an ongoing process to ensure the continuation of everyday life during disruption. The article concludes by arguing for the need to bring forward studies on informal preparedness activities, in a research field where household preparedness tends to be framed using a top‐down perspective on crisis management.

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“…Diminishing reserves of fossil fuels, and thus vulnerability to volatile costs, and a need to meet stringent targets to de-carbonise the energy supply may mean increasing reliance on renewable energy in the coming decades. Unless storage of energy becomes viable to avoid blackouts becoming normality [23] we will need to synchronise our consumption with the availability of this resource.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Tiree Energy Pulse

Simm

Ferrario

Friday

et al. 2015

Proceedings of the 33rd Annual ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems

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In many parts of the world, the electricity supply industry makes the task of dealing with unpredictable spikes and dips in production and demand invisible to consumers, maintaining a seemingly unlimited supply. A future increase in reliance on time-variable renewable sources of electricity may lead to greater fluctuations in supply. We engaged remote islanders as equal partners in a research project that investigated through technology-mediated enquiry the topic of synchronising energy consumption with supply, and together built a prototype renewable energy forecast display. A number of participants described a change in their practices, saving high energy tasks for times when local renewable energy was expected to be available, despite having no financial incentive to do so. The main contributions of this paper are in: 1) the results of co-development sessions exploring systems supporting synchronising consumption with supply and 2) the findings arising from the deployment of the prototype.

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Disruption is Normal: Blackouts, Breakdowns and the Elasticity of Everyday Life

Cited by 51 publications

References 0 publications

Should there be more showers at the summer music festival? Studying the contextual dependence of resource consuming conventions and lessons for sustainable tourism

Should there be more showers at the summer music festival? Studying the contextual dependence of resource consuming conventions and lessons for sustainable tourism

Coping with blackouts: A practice theory approach to household preparedness

Tiree Energy Pulse

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