Emma Hinton | University of Southampton (original) (raw)
Papers by Emma Hinton
Architectural Engineering and Design Management, 2014
Existing theories have little to say about thermal comfort in the home. Most previous studies hav... more Existing theories have little to say about thermal comfort in the home. Most previous studies have focused on non-domestic buildings in which the occupants have limited opportunities to change the ambient environmental conditions. At home, people generally have greater freedom and, subject to the capabilities of the building and its systems, can decide and create conditions they consider comfortable. This paper reports on a detailed study of thermal comfort practices and energy consumption in different dwellings in South Wales using mixed methods to record physical conditions and householders' accounts of how and why they create those conditions. The methodology includes a robust form of thermal comfort survey that has enabled us to link reported comfort votes to measurements of prevailing environmental conditions. Householders also participated in in-depth interviews to describe how they maintain comfort in their everyday lives. This study reveals diverse time-varying profiles of thermal conditions, in which there are significant differences in temperatures in the main living spaces and in the temperature distribution, for example, between living rooms and bedrooms. It shows how householders develop a range of behaviours, skills and knowledge to create thermal conditions they consider acceptable rather than those predicted by conventional comfort theories.
A growing body of multi-disciplinary literature has focused on consumption as a site for sustaina... more A growing body of multi-disciplinary literature has focused on consumption as a site for sustainability. Existing studies of sustainable consumption advocacy tend to consider paper-based or face-to-face forms and explore the extent to which this advocacy produces measurable behaviour change. In this thesis I take a different approach. I examine a comparatively unexplored advocacy medium, specifically advocates’ use of virtual space. My concern is to contribute to our understanding of the ways that third sector organisations (TSOs) use virtual advocacy spaces to attempt to shape the ways we govern our consumption, and the factors influencing how they govern their production of this advocacy. To do this I combine an empirical analysis of the reported experiences of 70 TSOs active in the UK, collected via questionnaires and interviews, supported by observations of advocacy in virtual spaces (through analysis of the content of participants’ websites) and physical spaces (through some participant observation). I approach this material with a theoretical framework that draws from the neo-Foucauldian literature on government and power (including concepts of governmentality, power/knowledge, biopower and surveillance) and with reference to theoretical approaches from social network analysis and critical discourse analysis. I reflect on the ways in which advocates are encouraged to govern themselves in the production of their advocacy, specifically with reference to the influence of network membership and availability of resources, and the forms of ideal advocate subjectivities that are produced as a result. I also consider the ways in which this advocacy works to produce particular understandings of and ways of knowing about sustainable consumption and sustainable consumers, which are used to attempt to influence our self-government. I discuss the possibilities for, and limitations of, a more egalitarian approach to the production of this advocacy and, by extension, sustainable consumption and sustainable consuming subjects.
Draft of book chapter later published in the International Handbook of Environmental Sociology (2nd edition). This version published in published in the Environment, Politics and Development Research Group, King's College London working paper series, no. 12, 2009
Hinton, E.D. and Redclift, M. 2009. Austerity and sufficiency: the changing politics of sustainable consumption. Environment, Politics and Development Research Group, King's College London working paper series, no. 17. , 2009
published in the Environment, Politics and Development Research Group, King's College London working paper series, no. 16, 2009
Individuals are increasingly urged to ‘do their bit’ to address a suite of contemporary environme... more Individuals are increasingly urged to ‘do their bit’ to address a suite of contemporary environmental, social and economic crises including climate change, peak oil and unfair trade. Consumption has been constructed as an important means by which individuals can tackle these issues, and third sector organisations occupy a key role as advocates supporting individuals in this quest. These advocacy groups and organisations are increasingly using the Internet to reach their publics, where this electronic form of advocacy – or ‘e-advocacy’ – encourages and makes possible particular kinds of actions, and consequently shapes our understanding of what sustainable consumption and being a sustainable consumer involves. I propose a typology of five main types of actions promoted in this sustainable consumption e-advocacy, and with reference to Daniel Miller and James Carrier’s theory of Virtualism I argue that this e-advocacy demonstrates a peculiarly ‘virtual’ form of Virtualism so far undescribed in the literature.
Progressive Governance paper series , 2008
Book chapters by Emma Hinton
Critical Environmental Politics, 2013
What does it mean to be a citizen? Who can be a citizen, what should a citizen do, and what can c... more What does it mean to be a citizen? Who can be a citizen, what should a citizen do, and what can citizens expect in return? Broadly speaking, citizenship is ‘a socio-legal status defined by specific sets of rights’, or put another way, it ‘is concerned with a diverse set of practices and cultures that structure complex patterns of inclusion and exclusion within modern society’ (Stevenson, 2006). The concept has a long history – it can be traced back to ancient Greece, but modern conceptualisations have developed since the seventeenth century, in tandem with capitalism (Dean, 2001) – and in that time, multiple approaches to citizenship have developed. In recognition of this volume’s focus on critical environmental politics, this chapter will focus on some of the key ways that environmental citizenship has been understood. Broadly speaking, there are three main approaches to understanding this kind of citizenship: republican, liberal and post-cosmopolitan. In this chapter I begin by discussing some core ideas, notably that understandings of environmentally-oriented citizenship vary in terms of their emphasis on and definitions of rights and responsibilities, on who (or what) counts as an environmental citizen, on what forms citizenly action can take and in which spaces. I then discuss some key thinkers associated with three distinct formulations of environmentally-oriented citizenship (post-cosmopolitan, liberal and republican) before going on to consider the critical potential of environmentally-oriented citizenship in the round, drawing from ideas of governmentality and post-politics.
Handbook on Climate Change and Human Security, 2013
Homes have been framed by a range of stakeholders, from energy companies to governments and campa... more Homes have been framed by a range of stakeholders, from energy companies to governments and campaigning groups, as an important site for reducing energy use and, more particularly, meeting national climate change goals. Improving the efficiency of existing homes (and commercial buildings) is critical to such efforts. Comfort, and an adequate standard of warmth, is also a critical aspect of human security. A recent report on fuel poverty (Hills 2012) claims a ‘profoundly disappointing’ 3 million households will be fuel-poor by 2016, despite the introduction of government measures intended to tackle the problem. Government policy to improve the energy performance of the existing (domestic) housing stock has, from the 1990s onwards, pursued two dominant (if, at times, connecting) models of transformation. The first prioritizes the behaviour (and choices) of individual energy consumers. Efforts to engage householders in changing their behaviour in order to reduce domestic emissions have traditionally been underpinned by notions of responsible and rational individuals, free in their ‘choices’ (but also implicitly morally governed to make the correct choice). The route to change was the provision of information to fill a presumed public ‘knowledge’ deficit (Owens, 2000) and inculcate more (eco)rational attitudes, beliefs and values. At the same time we can also identify a more systemic, and technocratic, approach to delivering change, reflected in a suite of intervention- based programmes designed by national government, local governments, energy companies and civil society actors, aimed at materially and technologically re- engineering the domestic environment to ensure that reductions in GHG emissions are achieved and to make participation ‘easy’ (Marres, 2008). Yet, in practice, both paradigms have fallen short of expectations in terms of delivering transformation in patterns of energy consumption. Our aim in this chapter is to engage with these dominant models of social transformation, and their critiques – particularly in relation to issues of materiality and agency. From this we argue for a socio- technical approach to securing decarbonization of the built environment – one that recognizes the social and material constitution of everyday domestic practices.
International Handbook of Environmental Sociology (2nd Edition), 2010
In 1997, when the first edition of this handbook was published, academic engagement with the noti... more In 1997, when the first edition of this handbook was published, academic engagement with the notion of sustainable consumption (SC) was limited. Since then, academics from across the disciplines of human geography, environmental psychology, industrial ecology and ecological economics have undertaken a wealth of new research and writing in this field. Moreover, there have been novel developments in international and national policies surrounding SC, in practitioner-based approaches to various forms of advocacy, and in global political economies that have the potential to greatly alter the SC playing field. In short, consumption as a growing form of ‘green governmentality’ (Rutherford 2007) – in addition to how SC itself is and should be governed – has become a key interest throughout much of the relatively well-off ‘society of consumers’ (Bauman 2007) in the industrial North, which is related to various forms of inequality in its application and uptake (see the 2008 special issue of Local Environment (volume 13 issue 8) on inequality and sustainable consumption). This chapter focuses on describing many of these developments, beginning with a brief contextualising review of international and UK policy surrounding SC. Two sections follow from here; the first is on the important but contentious role that ‘information’ plays in SC networks and how this supports the ‘responsibilization’ for sustainability onto the figure of the consumer in the spaces of the ‘everyday’. The second section explores the links between SC and ecological modernization and the associated product-focused pathways to SC that constitute much of the current policy focus. Next, we discuss several important ‘alternatives’ to these more mainstream approaches in the discourses around voluntary simplicity, (re)localised economic systems and the emerging concept of ‘hedonic’ consumption, the latter building on consumers’ self-interests in developing more environmentally- and socially-friendly lifestyle choices. We then consider several different ways designed to quantify the progress to SC through, for example, the vastly popular processes of carbon ‘footprinting’ of one’s personal consumption and lifestyle behaviours. We conclude with a short consideration of the current and impending economic recession in the context of SC; here ‘simplicity’ might become less voluntary and more a product of necessity. At the same time, this new economic climate, coupled with increasing popular concern over climate change and peak oil, in combination with renewed policy commitments in support of sustainable consumption, could open up new opportunities for the discourses around SC to be re-focused onto the continuing multi-scale inequalities of lifestyles and livelihoods across the globe.
Conference Presentations by Emma Hinton
The consumer-citizen is widely identified as a key agent of environmental change in political dis... more The consumer-citizen is widely identified as a key agent of environmental change in political discourse: individuals are framed as consumers and environmental change as a matter of consumer choice (e.g. Hobson, 2002). Much attention has focused on shaping consumer preferences, targeting individual attitudes and values on the assumption that this will lead to desired behaviours and choices. More recently, there has been a shift in focus towards facilitating the consumption of a range of energy efficient and renewable energy technologies in the home through policy mechanisms such as CERT, CESP and the proposed Green Deal. Criticisms of extant models of behaviour change, and the associated assumptions about individual agency and the drivers of consumption, are now well rehearsed (e.g. Shove, 2010). Yet recent calls for situated accounts of the practices, contexts and material settings of everyday life that enable or disable social transformation have seen only limited empirical application and debate. In this paper, we follow a number of socio-technical (energy efficiency) „experiments‟ in homes in England and Wales, and explore their consequences for domestic practices and for wider social (and political) transformation. We consider the ways in which a practice-based understanding of the consequences of technological change offers new and productive insights for engaging household(er)s as political subjects and delivering reductions in domestic energy consumption, which may in turn support a transition to a low carbon energy system.
Architectural Engineering and Design Management, 2014
Existing theories have little to say about thermal comfort in the home. Most previous studies hav... more Existing theories have little to say about thermal comfort in the home. Most previous studies have focused on non-domestic buildings in which the occupants have limited opportunities to change the ambient environmental conditions. At home, people generally have greater freedom and, subject to the capabilities of the building and its systems, can decide and create conditions they consider comfortable. This paper reports on a detailed study of thermal comfort practices and energy consumption in different dwellings in South Wales using mixed methods to record physical conditions and householders' accounts of how and why they create those conditions. The methodology includes a robust form of thermal comfort survey that has enabled us to link reported comfort votes to measurements of prevailing environmental conditions. Householders also participated in in-depth interviews to describe how they maintain comfort in their everyday lives. This study reveals diverse time-varying profiles of thermal conditions, in which there are significant differences in temperatures in the main living spaces and in the temperature distribution, for example, between living rooms and bedrooms. It shows how householders develop a range of behaviours, skills and knowledge to create thermal conditions they consider acceptable rather than those predicted by conventional comfort theories.
A growing body of multi-disciplinary literature has focused on consumption as a site for sustaina... more A growing body of multi-disciplinary literature has focused on consumption as a site for sustainability. Existing studies of sustainable consumption advocacy tend to consider paper-based or face-to-face forms and explore the extent to which this advocacy produces measurable behaviour change. In this thesis I take a different approach. I examine a comparatively unexplored advocacy medium, specifically advocates’ use of virtual space. My concern is to contribute to our understanding of the ways that third sector organisations (TSOs) use virtual advocacy spaces to attempt to shape the ways we govern our consumption, and the factors influencing how they govern their production of this advocacy. To do this I combine an empirical analysis of the reported experiences of 70 TSOs active in the UK, collected via questionnaires and interviews, supported by observations of advocacy in virtual spaces (through analysis of the content of participants’ websites) and physical spaces (through some participant observation). I approach this material with a theoretical framework that draws from the neo-Foucauldian literature on government and power (including concepts of governmentality, power/knowledge, biopower and surveillance) and with reference to theoretical approaches from social network analysis and critical discourse analysis. I reflect on the ways in which advocates are encouraged to govern themselves in the production of their advocacy, specifically with reference to the influence of network membership and availability of resources, and the forms of ideal advocate subjectivities that are produced as a result. I also consider the ways in which this advocacy works to produce particular understandings of and ways of knowing about sustainable consumption and sustainable consumers, which are used to attempt to influence our self-government. I discuss the possibilities for, and limitations of, a more egalitarian approach to the production of this advocacy and, by extension, sustainable consumption and sustainable consuming subjects.
Draft of book chapter later published in the International Handbook of Environmental Sociology (2nd edition). This version published in published in the Environment, Politics and Development Research Group, King's College London working paper series, no. 12, 2009
Hinton, E.D. and Redclift, M. 2009. Austerity and sufficiency: the changing politics of sustainable consumption. Environment, Politics and Development Research Group, King's College London working paper series, no. 17. , 2009
published in the Environment, Politics and Development Research Group, King's College London working paper series, no. 16, 2009
Individuals are increasingly urged to ‘do their bit’ to address a suite of contemporary environme... more Individuals are increasingly urged to ‘do their bit’ to address a suite of contemporary environmental, social and economic crises including climate change, peak oil and unfair trade. Consumption has been constructed as an important means by which individuals can tackle these issues, and third sector organisations occupy a key role as advocates supporting individuals in this quest. These advocacy groups and organisations are increasingly using the Internet to reach their publics, where this electronic form of advocacy – or ‘e-advocacy’ – encourages and makes possible particular kinds of actions, and consequently shapes our understanding of what sustainable consumption and being a sustainable consumer involves. I propose a typology of five main types of actions promoted in this sustainable consumption e-advocacy, and with reference to Daniel Miller and James Carrier’s theory of Virtualism I argue that this e-advocacy demonstrates a peculiarly ‘virtual’ form of Virtualism so far undescribed in the literature.
Progressive Governance paper series , 2008
Critical Environmental Politics, 2013
What does it mean to be a citizen? Who can be a citizen, what should a citizen do, and what can c... more What does it mean to be a citizen? Who can be a citizen, what should a citizen do, and what can citizens expect in return? Broadly speaking, citizenship is ‘a socio-legal status defined by specific sets of rights’, or put another way, it ‘is concerned with a diverse set of practices and cultures that structure complex patterns of inclusion and exclusion within modern society’ (Stevenson, 2006). The concept has a long history – it can be traced back to ancient Greece, but modern conceptualisations have developed since the seventeenth century, in tandem with capitalism (Dean, 2001) – and in that time, multiple approaches to citizenship have developed. In recognition of this volume’s focus on critical environmental politics, this chapter will focus on some of the key ways that environmental citizenship has been understood. Broadly speaking, there are three main approaches to understanding this kind of citizenship: republican, liberal and post-cosmopolitan. In this chapter I begin by discussing some core ideas, notably that understandings of environmentally-oriented citizenship vary in terms of their emphasis on and definitions of rights and responsibilities, on who (or what) counts as an environmental citizen, on what forms citizenly action can take and in which spaces. I then discuss some key thinkers associated with three distinct formulations of environmentally-oriented citizenship (post-cosmopolitan, liberal and republican) before going on to consider the critical potential of environmentally-oriented citizenship in the round, drawing from ideas of governmentality and post-politics.
Handbook on Climate Change and Human Security, 2013
Homes have been framed by a range of stakeholders, from energy companies to governments and campa... more Homes have been framed by a range of stakeholders, from energy companies to governments and campaigning groups, as an important site for reducing energy use and, more particularly, meeting national climate change goals. Improving the efficiency of existing homes (and commercial buildings) is critical to such efforts. Comfort, and an adequate standard of warmth, is also a critical aspect of human security. A recent report on fuel poverty (Hills 2012) claims a ‘profoundly disappointing’ 3 million households will be fuel-poor by 2016, despite the introduction of government measures intended to tackle the problem. Government policy to improve the energy performance of the existing (domestic) housing stock has, from the 1990s onwards, pursued two dominant (if, at times, connecting) models of transformation. The first prioritizes the behaviour (and choices) of individual energy consumers. Efforts to engage householders in changing their behaviour in order to reduce domestic emissions have traditionally been underpinned by notions of responsible and rational individuals, free in their ‘choices’ (but also implicitly morally governed to make the correct choice). The route to change was the provision of information to fill a presumed public ‘knowledge’ deficit (Owens, 2000) and inculcate more (eco)rational attitudes, beliefs and values. At the same time we can also identify a more systemic, and technocratic, approach to delivering change, reflected in a suite of intervention- based programmes designed by national government, local governments, energy companies and civil society actors, aimed at materially and technologically re- engineering the domestic environment to ensure that reductions in GHG emissions are achieved and to make participation ‘easy’ (Marres, 2008). Yet, in practice, both paradigms have fallen short of expectations in terms of delivering transformation in patterns of energy consumption. Our aim in this chapter is to engage with these dominant models of social transformation, and their critiques – particularly in relation to issues of materiality and agency. From this we argue for a socio- technical approach to securing decarbonization of the built environment – one that recognizes the social and material constitution of everyday domestic practices.
International Handbook of Environmental Sociology (2nd Edition), 2010
In 1997, when the first edition of this handbook was published, academic engagement with the noti... more In 1997, when the first edition of this handbook was published, academic engagement with the notion of sustainable consumption (SC) was limited. Since then, academics from across the disciplines of human geography, environmental psychology, industrial ecology and ecological economics have undertaken a wealth of new research and writing in this field. Moreover, there have been novel developments in international and national policies surrounding SC, in practitioner-based approaches to various forms of advocacy, and in global political economies that have the potential to greatly alter the SC playing field. In short, consumption as a growing form of ‘green governmentality’ (Rutherford 2007) – in addition to how SC itself is and should be governed – has become a key interest throughout much of the relatively well-off ‘society of consumers’ (Bauman 2007) in the industrial North, which is related to various forms of inequality in its application and uptake (see the 2008 special issue of Local Environment (volume 13 issue 8) on inequality and sustainable consumption). This chapter focuses on describing many of these developments, beginning with a brief contextualising review of international and UK policy surrounding SC. Two sections follow from here; the first is on the important but contentious role that ‘information’ plays in SC networks and how this supports the ‘responsibilization’ for sustainability onto the figure of the consumer in the spaces of the ‘everyday’. The second section explores the links between SC and ecological modernization and the associated product-focused pathways to SC that constitute much of the current policy focus. Next, we discuss several important ‘alternatives’ to these more mainstream approaches in the discourses around voluntary simplicity, (re)localised economic systems and the emerging concept of ‘hedonic’ consumption, the latter building on consumers’ self-interests in developing more environmentally- and socially-friendly lifestyle choices. We then consider several different ways designed to quantify the progress to SC through, for example, the vastly popular processes of carbon ‘footprinting’ of one’s personal consumption and lifestyle behaviours. We conclude with a short consideration of the current and impending economic recession in the context of SC; here ‘simplicity’ might become less voluntary and more a product of necessity. At the same time, this new economic climate, coupled with increasing popular concern over climate change and peak oil, in combination with renewed policy commitments in support of sustainable consumption, could open up new opportunities for the discourses around SC to be re-focused onto the continuing multi-scale inequalities of lifestyles and livelihoods across the globe.
The consumer-citizen is widely identified as a key agent of environmental change in political dis... more The consumer-citizen is widely identified as a key agent of environmental change in political discourse: individuals are framed as consumers and environmental change as a matter of consumer choice (e.g. Hobson, 2002). Much attention has focused on shaping consumer preferences, targeting individual attitudes and values on the assumption that this will lead to desired behaviours and choices. More recently, there has been a shift in focus towards facilitating the consumption of a range of energy efficient and renewable energy technologies in the home through policy mechanisms such as CERT, CESP and the proposed Green Deal. Criticisms of extant models of behaviour change, and the associated assumptions about individual agency and the drivers of consumption, are now well rehearsed (e.g. Shove, 2010). Yet recent calls for situated accounts of the practices, contexts and material settings of everyday life that enable or disable social transformation have seen only limited empirical application and debate. In this paper, we follow a number of socio-technical (energy efficiency) „experiments‟ in homes in England and Wales, and explore their consequences for domestic practices and for wider social (and political) transformation. We consider the ways in which a practice-based understanding of the consequences of technological change offers new and productive insights for engaging household(er)s as political subjects and delivering reductions in domestic energy consumption, which may in turn support a transition to a low carbon energy system.