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As the 2024 conference season comes to a close, we are excited to present a round-up of the events in which SCI members participated.

Throughout Summer 2024, staff, doctoral candidates, and fellows of the Sustainable Consumption Institute actively contributed to a wide range of conferences focused on shaping visions and action plans for a sustainable future.

These events provided an unparalleled opportunity to share and discuss SCI research with colleagues from across continents. From the UK to Canada, Ireland, Turkey, Romania, The Netherlands, Norway, and Finland, they presented their research across diverse fields such as sociology, politics, work psychology, policy and futures studies.

SCI research was represented in discussions around the development of new frameworks for understanding the dynamics of green energy transitions, deeper exploration of environmental politics and inclusive sustainability, and the advancement of sustainable consumption and ethics. Other key areas of focus included sustainable agriculture and animal welfare, the impact of digitalization on urban lifestyles, and societal engagement in addressing environmental challenges.

Dynamics of Green Energy Transition

Mat Paterson and Sandra Barragán presented the first paper from the project “Green Energy Transitions and Global Disruption: The (Un)Just Transition to Net Zero”, funded by the University of Manchester, Faculty of Humanities.

The paper, titled “Capturing the Disruptive Nature of Green Energy Transitions: A Political Economy Approach” was presented at:

1. the RGS-IBG Annual International Conference 2024, held at the Society and Imperial College London, 27-30th August 2024;

2. the Annual IIPPE Conference in Political Economy at Istanbul Bilgi University, Türkiye, 4-7th September 2024.

It establishes a research agenda focused on disruption as a concept to understanding the dynamics of energy transitions. The paper argues that, while the empirical reality of such disruptions is widely recognised, the only literature that has explicitly conceptualised disruption is from the socio-technical transitions research tradition, which is too narrow to capture the full range of disruptive dynamics associated with green energy transitions. The researchers suggest that a framework rooted in critical political economy approaches is needed to address this gap. After conducting a detailed survey of a range of literatures (including trade, geopolitics, and green extractivism) that demonstrate the full scope of these disruptive dynamics, they propose a definition of disruption and an analytical framework that can both encapsulate the existing empirical research on these disruptions and guide future research.

Maria Sharmina gave an opening address at the ViTAL Living Lab conference setting out the latest challenges of addressing climate change.

ViTAL Living Lab conference held at The Institute for Advanced Environmental Research, Timișoara, Romania, 24 September 2024.

The conference marked the end of the ViTAL project, a collaboration with the Royal Air Force (RAF) Leeming Station, where Maria was co-chair of the Advisory Board. The project seeks to establish a living laboratory for the RAF and MOD to explore innovative and emerging technologies addressing climate change and promoting sustainability.

Social Inequalities and Sustainable Development

Sherilyn MacGregor presented a paper based on the “Towards Inclusive Environmental Sustainabilities” (TIES), a three-year research project that explores how the knowledge and practices of immigrants from countries in the Global South contribute to building just and sustainable cities in the Global North.

The paper was presented at a workshop titled “Climate Turbulence and Democratic Experimentation” held at the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies, University of Helsinki, 10-11th June 2024.

The international workshop was convened by Professor David Schlosberg (Director, Sydney Environment Institute) as part of his Erkko Visiting Professorship of Studies in Contemporary Society at the Collegium. Sherilyn’s paper, “Unsettling knowledge: a theoretical framework for researching at the intersection of climate justice and international migration” will become part of the monograph that the TIES team is writing as the major academic output of the Leverhulme-funded research project.

Caroline Cornier presented the theoretical framework of her PhD project:

1. “The Political Economy of Commodity Dependence” as part of the panel The Colonial Roots of Commodity Dependence at the Development Studies Association Conference (DSA) at SOAS, 26-28th June 2024.

2. “Commodity Dependence and Political Settlement Analysis – The Case of Côte d’Ivoire” as part of the panel The Political Economy of Contemporary Economic Transformation at the European Consortium for Political Research (ECPR) at University College Dublin, 12-16th August 2024.

The presentation was summarising the current state of her PhD project which seeks to develop a framework that can account for the external and internal factors of African economies’ lack of economic transformation. The presentation built on her literature review and research question for some preliminary ideas for her theoretical framework.

Digital Mobility Platforms and Urban Lifestyle

Michael Hodson, Andy McMeekin and Andy Lockhart gave a presentation titled “The Chimera of Transformative Urban Innovation Policy – New State Spaces and Contested Imaginaries” at the International Sustainability Transitions Conference in Oslo, 17-19th June 2024.

Presentation contributes and extends debates on urban reconfiguration by exploring how the digital platformisation of urban infrastructure is challenging the organisation of existing urban systems and how they are governed. Recent debates have sought to position urban transition as an incremental process of reconfiguration informed by novel relationships between existing systems of provision and new infrastructural and governing arrangements. We extend these debates by exploring how digital platformisation of urban infrastructure is challenging the organisation and governance of existing urban systems. Bringing together literature on urban transitions with platform urbanism, we focus empirically on the rapid expansion of multiple digital mobility platforms in urban contexts. We ask: in what ways are multiple digital mobility platforms reconfiguring urban public transport systems and who is in control of this process?

Collective Actions in Tackling Environmental Issues

James Jackson presented the results of a joint interdisciplinary project between the University of Manchester and the University of Sheffield, co-conducted with Paul Tobin (University of Manchester), Ciara Kelly, and Liz Bailes (University of Sheffield).

1. Paper “Is moral conflict fuelling burnout in employees in environmental sector charities” presented at 8th Annual British Environmental Psychology Society (BrEPS), University of Portsmouth, 11-12th July 2024.

The presentation combines disciplinary insights from (work/environmental) psychology and environmental politics to explore how employees in environmental non-government organisations (ENGOs) experience emotional burn out whilst working on sustainability issues. The presentation was based on 32 interviews with ENGOs to explore the idea of ‘moral injury’ whereby employees become burnout due to their inability to deliver their ‘mission driven’ objectives.

2. Paper “Being stuck in the middle has its challenges’: the importance of employee wellbeing for ENGOs intermediation within the climate policy process” presented at the European Consortium for Political Research (ECPR) conference, University College Dublin, 12-15th August 2024.

The presentation focuses on the process of ‘intermediation’. In particular, the presentation details the barriers ENGOs experience in attempting to intermediate between public and private sector organisations when attempting to achieve climate objectives.

Luke Yates presented a paper “Strategy and Collective Action: a research agenda” at the American Sociological Association Meeting in Montreal, 9-13th August 2024.

The paper argues that strategy is central to work on collective action, but is undertheorised and rarely directly investigated. We disaggregate the term in three sections: strategic action (goal-directed activity); strategizing (practices for coordination); and strategies (future-oriented guidance). The first part argues that literature on strategic action, especially field theory, presents strategy as an important, yet opaque, quality. To address this, we discuss the potential of analysing strategizing using theories of practice; and strategies using work on projectivity. To advance the agenda, we recommend several moves, including examining both more and less formal modes of strategizing or emergent coordinating practices, identifying and analysing the elements of coordinating practices; measuring the form of future orientations using; and exploring a wider range of the content of future orientations which guide and inspire action and cultural change.

Futures of Sustainability and Everyday Consumption Practices

Dan Welch presented the paper “Imagined Futures of Crisis in the UK and Norway”, co-written with Audun Kjus and Nina Heidenstrøm at the key futures studies international conference Anticipations at the Lancaster University, 11 September 2024.

Dan Welch presented work as a part of the research project, “Imagine: Contested Futures of Sustainability” (PI Heidenstrom, Consumption Research Norway). The paper drew on data from Dan’s Imagined Futures of Consumption project collected with the Mass Observation project in 2019 and a qualitative survey conducted by the Norwegian Ethnological Institute in 2022, developed by Audun Kjus. Both datasets showed the dominant future imaginary to be ‘the crisis ladder’, an escalating series of environmental, social and political crises leading to the more or less breakdown of contemporary society. In both the British and Norwegian data the virtue of frugality, both practiced in present personal consumption and/or as a future ethic of post crisis society was foregrounded as an amelioration of and escape from the alienation of contemporary consumer society.

Helen Holmes gave a keynote “Mundane materialities of nothing: the rhythms, routines and affinities of invisible, hidden and transient things” at the Routines, Rhythms and Affective Intimacy in Everyday Life Symposium at the University of Westminster, 11th June 2024.

This paper draws on over 15 years of research into the mundane materialities of everyday life, acknowledging Mason’s (2008, 2018) work on affinities to explore the connective power that everyday objects have and the ‘material affinities’ they enable. While the role of objects in structuring our daily lives is well documented, I have always felt that work on materiality fails to fully capture the extent of our relationships with material things – and particularly, material things which are no longer in our possession or for a variety of reasons may be invisible, hidden or intangible. Drawing on Scott’s (2019) concept of nothing, my research has sought to illuminate the potency and performativity of the objects and materials of nothing. In this presentation, I examine how the materialities of nothing can disrupt our rhythms and routines—from the imagined other woven into second-hand objects, to the material disconnect we experience when an object is no longer viable, to the collective loss we experience when an object of historical or cultural significance is destroyed. I argue that mundane material affinities of nothing play a crucial role in our affective intimacies with others, inextricably binding us to other people, places, times and things.

Sustainable Agriculture and Animal Welfare

Jo Mylan gave a keynote lecture on ‘The Multi-faceted Diffusion of Alternative Proteins’ at the 8th Cultivate Conference at The University of Sheffield, 12thJune 2024.

Jeremy Brice gave a presentation entitled ‘“We don’t talk about animals”: responsible investment and the assetisation of farm animal welfare’ at the European Association for the Study of Science and Technology (EASST) and the Society for Social Studies of Science (4S) conference in Amsterdam, 17th July 2024.

In the paper I explored how campaigners’ efforts to convince financial institutions to engage with animal welfare concerns have transformed the meaning, nature and content of this issue as well as the metrics by which companies’ performance in delivering ‘good’ animal welfare are judged.

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