Users, Consumers and Social Frameworks

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The Users, Consumers, and Social Frameworks theme within University of Cambridge's energy initiative includes research into how energy use is affected by individual choices, culture and social networks.  Research is centred in the Departments of Social Anthropology, Psychology, Sociology, Archaeology, Land Economy, Faculty of Economics, Faculty of Law and Judge Business School.

• The application of the social sciences to technology use, including the Flagship Retrofit project, which is trialling ways in which public housing stock in the UK can be modified in ways that reduce energy usage through a combination of design interventions and behaviour change.
• Research into environmental change from an anthropological standpoint: research on human-induced environmental transformations, resource exploitation and energy systems, vulnerability to climate change impacts, environmental activism and denial, and questions of lifestyle and sustainability.
• Climate Histories: Communicating Cultural Knowledge of Environmental Change. This Network speaks to the theme of Histories of Environmental Change by asking how people around the world perceive, narrate, and frame changes in their environment and climate.
• Human landscapes: the relations, both short- and long-term, between people and environment in the past.
• Public communication, perceptions, and opposition to energy technologies and social acceptance of new technologies, including carbon capture and storage and nuclear power.
• Behavioural economics, including investigations into energy consumption and social learning in financial decision making in the energy markets.

Please visit individual faculty profiles to learn more about their research in the Users, Consumers and Social Frameworks theme.