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Research Fellow in Energy Justice and Transitions, University of Sussex

School/department: University of Sussex Business School / Science Policy Research Unit (SPRU)
Hours: full time Requests for flexible working options will be considered (subject to business need).
Contract: fixed term for 14 months 
Reference: 6260
Salary: starting at £33,797 to £40,322 per annum, pro rata if part time
Placed on: 28 June 2021
Closing date:  12 July 2021.  Applications must be received by midnight of the closing date.
Expected interview date: w/c 19 July 2021
Expected start date: September or October 2021

The Sussex Energy Group, within the Science Policy Research Unit at the University of Sussex Business School, are seeking to appoint a Research Fellow in Energy Justice and Transitions to work with Professor Benjamin Sovacool, Professor Adrian Smith, and Dr Mari Martiskainen and teams on two projects: the Centre for Research Into Energy Demand Solutions (CREDS) funded project Fuel and Transport Poverty in the UK’s Energy Transition (FAIR), and the ESRC / JPI SOLSTICE funded project Responsive Organising for Low Emission Societies (ROLES).

The Research Fellow will organise workshops, focus groups and undertake interviews with a range of research participants including policy makers, regulators, energy suppliers, advocacy groups, and householders. They will analyse interview and focus group data using qualitative data analysis methods; contribute to writing academic journal papers, policy briefings and blog posts; and present research findings to key audiences.

Essential criteria for the post include:

  • A PhD in a related area (e.g. energy social science research or other relevant social science research)
  • Knowledgeable about themes in energy justice, energy poverty and/or power in relation to energy studies
  • Good general knowledge about UK energy policy
  • Proven ability to organise, undertake and analyse systematically in-depth qualitative interviews with a range of policy, practitioner and lay subjects to academic and ethical standards
  • Experience organising workshops with policy, practitioner and lay participants, and documenting and analysing workshops
  • Ability to write reports and blogpost for non-academic audiences, particularly policy-makers and think tanks

Please contact Prof Benjamin Sovacool (B.Sovacool@sussex.ac.uk) for informal enquiries.

To apply:

Download our academic application form [DOC 199.50KB] and Personal details and equal opportunities form [DOC 110.00KB] and fill in all sections.

Email your completed application, and personal details and equal opportunities form, to usbsrecruitment@sussex.ac.uk  

You should attach your application form and all documents to the email in PDF format (we are unable to accept applications as google.docs or .pages) and use the format job reference number / job title / your name in the subject line.

You can also send your application by post to Human Resources Division, Sussex House, University of Sussex, Falmer, Brighton, BN1 9RH.

CFP – Un/sustainable futures: The hidden abode of the ‘ecological transition’ , SIAC Conference 22-25 September in Rome

Calling for papers for the panel Un/sustainable futures: The hidden abode of the ‘ecological transition’ (see abstract below) at the 3rd SIAC Conference Future: Anthropologies of the Future, the Future of Anthropology, which will be held in Rome on 22-25 September 2021. https://www.siacantropologia.it/panel-en/

Submit a proposal:https://www.siacantropologia.it/call-for-papers/

Deadline: 14 June 2021

*** P21: Un/sustainable futures: The hidden abode of the ‘ecological transition’ ***
https://www.siacantropologia.it/p21/
Convenors:Lorenzo D’Angelo (University of Hamburg)Antonio Maria Pusceddu (Centro em Rede de Investigação em Antropologia – Instituto Universitário de Lisboa)

Discussant: Eleanor Fisher (The Nordic Africa Institute)

Keywords: ecological crisis; extractivism and post-extractivism; human/non-human relations; socio-environmental inequality; sustainability

Over the last few decades, the worldwide spread of climate justice movements contributed to pushing the ecological crisis to the core of public concerns, while academic debates on the Anthropocene, sustainability, extractivism, circular economy, and degrowth have made inroads also into non-academic audiences. All these debates variously address the need for global systemic changes based on alternative economies and ecological relationships between humans and non-humans. However, despite the increasing awareness of living in a damaged planet, the question of how to imaginatively and practically realise alternative sustainable futures remains open.
At institutional levels, national and supra-national policy frameworks emphasise the pressing demand for more environmentally “sustainable” economic systems. The Covid-19 pandemic further boosted the narrative on “the ecological transition” aimed at designing and orienting the “green” conversion of technology for energy and agro-food production, transports, and communications. This restructuring process is already reshaping the growing demand of key “natural” resources, deeply affecting activities such as mining, farming, and fishing. Still, the uneven geography of planetary extraction that materially sustains this process is often disguised by the recursive claim of the digital economy, green procurement, electric mobility, and decarbonization as crucial pillars of the “ecological transition”. Against this background, technological innovations emerge as a way of fixing specific problems leaving unquestioned – or even enhancing – socio-economic and environmental violence and inequalities.
This panel aims to explore the hidden abodes of this “ecological transition”. It invites proposals that examine how processes of “green” restructuring emerge as a potential new frontier of dispossession and accumulation which leave untouched the very premises that brought us to the current situation. In this light, it encourages ethnographically informed proposals that address the contradictions and complexities underlying the social and material construction of un/sustainable futures, and that explore alternative cosmologies or non-capitalist imaginaries and practices of sustainability and just transition.
Possible topics include:
• the social and political construction of resources as “green”, “clean”, or “fair”;
• the role of specific technological innovations in the narrative of “ecological transition”;
• the way policies on sustainability affect livelihoods, labour regimes and environments;
• the environmental moralization of “natural resources” (according to a logic of costs and benefits for the future of the planet);
• non-extractive or “post-extractive” practices and narratives aiming at re-configuring human and non-human relations;
• frictions and conflicts generated by the contradictory entanglements of the “ecological transition”.