Illuminating austerity: Lighting poverty as an agent and signifier of the Greek crisis

Abstract

Light – whether natural or artificial – plays multiple roles in the home: both as a material enabler of everyday life and as a device for exercising a variety of social relations. The post-2008 Greek economic crisis has endangered those roles by limiting people’s ability to access or afford adequate energy services. This paper focuses on the enforced lack of illumination in the home, and the strategies and tactics undertaken by households to overcome this challenge. I connect illumination practices and discourses to the implementation of austerity, by arguing that the threat of darkness has become a tool for compelling vulnerable groups to pay their electricity bills. The evidence presented in the paper is based on two sets of interviews with 25 households (including a total of 55 adult members) living in and around Thessaloniki – Greece’s second largest city, and one that has suffered severe economic consequences as a result of the crisis. I have established that the under-consumption of light is one of the most pronounced expressions of energy poverty, and as such endangers the ability to participate in the customs that define membership of society. But the emergence of activist-led amateur electricians and the symbolic and material mobilization of light for political purposes have also created multiple opportunities for resistance.

Gender and energy: domestic inequities reconsidered

“…More broadly, this opens the path for producing novel and systemic understandings of how urban energy circulations and metabolisms (Heynen, 2016;Heynen, Kaika, & Swyngedouw, 2006) affect, and are affected by, gendered energy vulnerabilities. It becomes possible to map and unpack the nuanced performativity of those vulnerabilities (Petrova, 2017(Petrova, , 2018 not only in homes, but also at the urban scale and beyond. Our investigation of these aspects is based on empirical findings from three in-depth qualitative studies of energy poverty focussed on Central, Eastern and Southern Europeregions with some of the highest energy poverty rates in Europe (Bouzarovski & Thomson, 2018).…”

Transforming rural light and dark under planetary urbanisation: Comparing ordinary countrysides in India and the UK

“…In such a context, a failure to keep the lights on can be understood as symbolic of the wider rollback of the state. These links between austerity and lighting have also been established elsewhere in Europe (Petrova, ).…”

Everyday politics of austerity: Infrastructure and vulnerability in times of crisis

“…In a sense, the austerity regime has rendered the new energy poor in Greece both vulnerable and governable; vulnerable because new taxes, higher prices, lower incomes and inadequate socio-technical support have reinforced broader processes of precarization (Lorey, 2015) to increase the sensitivity to, and severity of, domestic energy deprivation; and governable because people's energy needs and practices have been used as a tool for the construction of crisis and as a mechanism for regulating everyday life (Agrawal, 2005). Discourses of environmentality and the 'fear of power cuts' have been socially engineered with the intention to produce 'responsible' citizens who respect norms and practices essential for the (re)configuration of postcrisis capitalism (Petrova, 2017b). This calls for more substantial engagements with local agencies and acts of empowerment as 'technologies of self' (Singh, 2013).…”

“…Based on Mouzelis (1979) and Poulantzas (1977) diaries, by recording their energy use and everyday life patterns during the two monitoring weeks. In designing the diaries we relied on approaches and techniques developed in the otherwise limited literature on the method (Petrova, 2017b).…”