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The energy sector in Lebanon faces many challenges: an ailing infrastructure dependent on fuel oil, a weakened electricity network damaged by violent conflicts over the years and an increasing demand for its services due to population growth, immigration and rising living standards. To fill the gap between this demand and the inadequate supply of e...
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Abstract: This study sheds light on a new generation of Swedish food producers, market gardeners, who are attracting attention in terms of food system sustainability, prompted by increasing consumer awareness about the value of healthy and locally produced food. Market gardening is part of a global agroecological movement opposed to industrialized...
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... An assemblage is therefore a description of the purposeful action that enables different elements to be gathered together [33]. As such, assemblage thinking, as an analytical approach or orientation [30], is gaining traction in the study of the socio-technical dynamics of energy technologies and infrastructures [34,35] because it lays bare how an individual engages not only with a new technology, but (in this case) also new practices of energy use, emergent environmental and political values, power relationships between tenants and social housing landlords, and experiences of change and disruption within the home. Something as seemingly mundane as a new air-source heat pump elicits an assemblage of socio-material discourses relating to the politics of low carbon investment [36], energy poverty and energy justice [37], electricity access [38], temporality and governance scale [39], and the evolving social practices of sustainable energy use [40,41]. ...
... This research explores the sociotechnical dynamics and justice considerations of low carbon transition within the social housing sector (SHS) through interpretive analysis of residents' perspectives. We explore the domestic low carbon transition informed by assemblage thinking: drawing upon the 'material turn' in social theory [75] consonant with recent research in the social studies of science and technology, energy geographies and environmental sociology [30,34,37,40,75]. The assemblage of the low carbon home in the SHS is one that connects the practical socio-material processes of retrofit to issues of participative and distributive energy justice (in the decisions over what technologies are implemented, when, how much disruption and who gets the energy within a multi-occupancy site), and pro-environmental political action that extends from the home to broader networks of political and social values (including greenwashing, low carbon investment and collective social action on sustainable societal transformation). ...
In this paper we bring to light the infrastructuring work carried out by people in Lebanon to establish and maintain everyday security in response to multiple simultaneously failing infrastructures. We do so through interviews with 13 participants from 12 digital and human rights organisations and two weeks of ethnographically informed fieldwork in Beirut, Lebanon, in July 2022. Through our analysis we develop the notion of security patchworking that makes visible the infrastructuring work necessitated to secure basic needs such as electricity provision, identity authentication and financial resources. Such practices are rooted in differing mechanisms of protection that often result in new forms of insecurity. We discuss the implications for CSCW and HCI researchers and point to security patchworking as a lens to be used when designing technologies to support infrastructuring, while advocating for collaborative work across CSCW and security research.
Energy injustice is driven by structural inequalities that are evident in differential electricity access and affordability that harm different groups in different ways. When an uprising began in Lebanon in 2019, the issue of energy justice emerged as a prominent grievance. We experimented with a combined democractic-justice approach to energy future-making via organising a pilot CA on energy justice. We emerge with four imaginaries based on the discourses and narratives expounded on during the deliberation sessions of the CA. The citizens’ dystopic imaginary sits alongside a state-centric petro-masculine imaginary. The empirical findings from the CA demonstrate that to move society towards a just transition, sustainability may not be a priority if more urgent pressures like access and affordability are affecting them more. In place of protracted energy shortage and political turmoil, trust in government affects people’s trust in the energy outlook and the promises of renewable energy. The CA experiment demonstrates how critical political moments can make say for more radical visions of sustainable energy future but how competing imaginaries can complicate questions of sustainability when a justice approach is used.
There is a growing turn towards the involvement of non-state actors in the provision of basic services in developing countries. Focusing on this turn, this paper advances the knowledge of the politics of assembling energy for development projects by non-state actors. Building on Tania Murray Li’s ideas on trusteeship, and drawing on assemblage theory, this paper argues that meanings of electricity are central to forging and fracturing alignments within energy assemblages. Trustees mobilise particular meanings of electricity to forge alignments with other actors and assemble projects. They connect electricity to development through the provision of electric lights and evoke the metaphor of enlightenment. People’s alternate meanings of electricity result in fractures in the assemblage. Actors that agree on meanings, converge, and those that disagree, diverge. Meanings play an important role in assembling and reassembling energy assemblages.
The paper is based on an ethnographic study of two community-based energy projects in India. This ethnographic research was done in 2012–13 in five villages in Bihar, an eastern province of India. Participant observations, interviews and group discussions were used to collect data, in addition to data collected from project websites and reports.
