People: Meet the Team
Professor Karen Henwood
I am a Professor in the Cardiff School of Social Sciences where I have worked since 2006. My substantive research interests are in identity and risk, and I seek to understand how people live with socio-cultural and environmental change. I have a longstanding track record of reflecting on social research methodologies and methods as means of fostering inquiry into the complex meanings and dynamics of people’s everyday lives, and for exploring social, cultural and psychological change.
Since 2007, I have been a Principal Investigator (PI) on the Timescapes network; in addition I have led the Men as Fathers project within that network. My involvement in Timescapes has made qualitative longitudinal/temporal methods of inquiry a key part of my methodological portfolio. My research is often conducted within collaborative networks, interdisciplinary teams and multi-method groupings. From 2003-2008 I jointly led (with Nick Pidgeon & Peter Simmons) the “living with nuclear risk” project as part of the ESRC’s Social Contexts and Responses to Risk or SCARR network.
I am affiliated to Cardiff University’s Centre for Understanding Risk and Sustainable Places Research Institute. My future plans include fostering the role of families and relationships researchers in sustainability science.
http://www.cardiff.ac.uk/socsi/contactsand people/academicstaff/G-H/professor-karen-henwood-overview.html
Professor Nick Pidgeon
I am Professor of Environmental Psychology and Director of the Understanding Risk Research Group within Cardiff University. I work on risk, risk perception, and risk communication and as such my research is interdisciplinary at the interface of social psychology, environmental sciences, and science and technology studies.
I am currently researching public responses to energy system change and energy technologies (e.g. nuclear power, renewable energy), climate change risks, and climate geoengineering. I have in the past led numerous policy oriented projects on issues of public responses to environmental risk issues and on ‘science in society’ for UK Government Departments, the Research Councils, the Royal Society, and Charities.
I am currently a member of the UK Department for Energy and Climate Change’s Science Advisory Group (SAG), and theme leader for the Climate Change Consortium for Wales.
http://psych.cf.ac.uk/contacts andpeople/academics/pidgeon.html
Dr Fiona Shirani
I am a Research Associate in the School of Social Sciences at Cardiff University. I have been involved in research projects related to fatherhood, health, fertility and work-based training, and have been part of the qualitative longitudinal Timescapes network. My research interests include family relationships, life course transitions and the impact these have on people’s perceptions of their futures. In light of my PhD and Timescapes study work, I am keen to foreground the importance of temporal research for the exploration of participants’ dynamic lived experiences, which is being taken forward in Energy Biographies.
http://www.cardiff.ac.uk/socsi/contacts andpeople/academicstaff/Q-S/ dr-fiona-shirani-overview.html
Dr Chris Groves
I am a research fellow in the School of Social Sciences at Cardiff. With a background in philosophy and sociology, my research interests focus on how people and institutions negotiate and deal with an intrinsically uncertain future – one that is increasingly imagined against the backdrop of global environmental change and accelerating technological innovation. Along with the ethical and political implications of a range of future-oriented discourses and practices (e.g. risk management, precautionary regulation, building resilience), my work has examined how our ideas about what it means for individuals and whole societies to take responsibility for their futures change alongside technological transformation. From nanotechnology and personalised genetic testing, to the decarbonisation agenda examined by Energy Biographies and now Flexis, the moral aspects of everyday life and of public policy are shifting alongside efforts to plan and remodel the social and natural worlds. These efforts are shaped by images of more efficiently managed, better governed, ‘smarter’ futures in which people increasingly take more responsibility for a whole range of different aspects of their lives. Building links between qualitative social science and normative ethics can help understand both how technologies and values change alongside each other, and what is really at stake in these imagined futures.
My recent monograph Care, Uncertainty and Intergenerational Ethics (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014) and the earlier Future Matters: Action, Knowledge, Ethics (Brill, 2007), co-authored with Professor Barbara Adam (Social Science, Cardiff University), examines these themes in depth, along with a variety of other recent publications.
http://www.cardiff.ac.uk/socsi/contactsandpeople/academicstaff/G-H/dr-chris-groves-overview.html
Dr Erin Roberts
PhD Student
PhD title: Reducing Energy Consumption in Everyday Life: A study of landscapes of energy consumption in rural households and communities in North Wales
I’m a first year ESRC funded PhD Student in SOCSI, using qualitative methods to examine landscapes of energy consumption in rural households and communities in North Wales. I am particularly interested in how identity, place, perceptions and practices combine to create specific landscapes of energy consumption, and how this may persist or change generationally.
My PhD is linked to the work of the Energy Biography’s team. I am supervised by Professor Henwood (in SOCSI) and Professor Pidgeon (in PSYCH). Dr Karen Parkhill is an additional member of my supervisory team. My PhD is sponsored by the Welsh Government (Climate Change and Water Division) and Cardiff University’s Sustainable Places Institute. As I am a Welsh speaker, and I will be conducting my fieldwork in North Wales, information about my research will be available in both Welsh and English.
http://www.cf.ac.uk/socsi/contactsandpeople/postgraduateresearchers/robertsem-overview.html
Rwyf yn fyfyriwr PhD yn y Gwyddorau Cymdeithasol, sydd yn fy mlwyddyn cyntaf. Rwyf yn cael fy ariannu gan yr Cyngor Ymchwil Economaidd a Chymdeithasol (ESRC). Rwyf yn defnyddio dulliau ansoddol i ymchwilio ‘tirweddau defnyddio ynni’ mewn cartrefi a chymunedau gwledig yng Ngogledd Cymru. Mae gennyf ddiddordeb arbennig yn sut mae hunaniaeth, lle, canfyddiadau ac arferion yn cyfuno i greu tirluniau penodol o ddefnydd ynni a sut y gall rhain barhau neu newid dros amser a chenedlaethau.
Mae fy PhD yn gysylltiedig â gwaith tîm Bywgraffiadau Ynni. Fy ngorychwylwyr yw’r Athro Karen Henwood (SOCSI) a’r Athro Nick Pidgeon (PSYCH), gyda Dr Karen Parkhill fel aelod ychwanegol o fy nhîm arolygu. Noddir fy PhD gan Lywodraeth Cymru (Is adran Newid yn yr Hinsawdd a Dŵr) a Sefydliad Lleoedd Cynaliadwy Prifysgol Caerdydd. Gan fy mod yn siarad Cymraeg, ac yn cynnal fy ngwaith maes yng Ngogledd Cymru, fydd gwybodaeth am fy ngwaith ar gael yn y Gymraeg a’r Saesneg.
Linked PhD Students
Alice Dal Gobbo
Postgraduate student (1+3 programme)
Title of current research project: “Enjoy! (Responsibly) – A Psychoanalytically Informed Critique of Neoliberal Discourses of Environmental Sustainability”
I am a Masters student enrolled in a 1+3 programme funded by the ESRC. I am based in the Cardiff University School of Social Sciences and supervised by prof. Karen Henwood and prof. Bella Dicks.
I am interested in investigating, primarily through qualitative research, the ways in which environmental issues are framed and constructed by public discourses. I look at how “sustainability” and related concepts (such as “sustainable development”) hide the existing contradictions between the capitalist system and the need to preserve the environment in order to maintain current patterns of production and consumption. I also aim to explore what perspectives for deep social and political change global warming and climate change open up.
My Msc Dissertation will consist of a psychoanalytically informed type of Discourse Analysis of policy documents targeting energy demand reduction. In my PhD I hope to be able to consider, through narrative interviews and multimodal data, how people’s everyday energy practices but also cultural understandings of consumption have changed as a consequence of the economic crisis and what are the consequences of these changes. I engage with both Sociological and Psychoanalytic theory and methods and hope to be able to engage in an interdisciplinary way with a range of research techniques drawn from across the Social Sciences.