Tim Chatterton is a Senior Research Fellow at the Air Quality Management Resource Centre at the University of the West of England, Bristol. He has spent 20 years working on air pollution, climate change and energy issues at the interface of academia and policy. His work covers both physical and social sciences.
Emissions reduction work for both air quality management and climate change mitigation has, in both policy and academic realms, tended to take a largely technocentric view. This often minimises, or even excludes, the role of people and society within both the problems we face and the potential solutions. Tim is currently the social science lead on a major EU Horizon 2020 project, CLAiR-City (www.claircity.eu). This project seeks to redefine how air quality management is undertaken through the development of a practice theory informed approach to both emissions modelling and policy development; working with citizens of six cities/city regions across Europe to help align policy with their expectations and aspirations for their everyday futures.
Jill Ebrey spent a number of years at the University of Chester as a Senior Lecturer in Media and Film Studies, whilst studying for her PhD (Goldsmiths College) in Sociology. In 2012, she became an Honorary Fellow at the University of Manchester, joining in 2013,the Understanding Everyday Participation – Articulating Cultural Value (UEP) research project as an Associate Researcher (www.everydayparticipation.org).
Jill is particularly interested in how both theories of everyday life, ethnography and theories of practice can be a part of a research-policy-practice nexus. With Andrew Miles, she has recently been awarded ESRC Impact Accelerator funding, to translate the UEP Aberdeen research into policy and practice. She is particularly interested, therefore, in talking with the group on how discussions about ‘futures’ can be generated in community settings, since that will be a feature of her forthcoming work in Aberdeen. Her work on the sociology of ‘the weekend’, has stimulated an additional interest in how utopian moments are created in the mundane everyday.
Katherine Ellsworth-Krebs is an assistant researcher based in the Centre for Housing Research at the University of St Andrews, Scotland. She has just submitted her PhD which developed the concept of ‘home comfort’ in order to understand how ‘normal’ expectations of home life influence domestic energy demand.
She is particularly interested in building on her PhD in the ‘Everyday Futures’ workshop by exploring how understanding home comfort as more than thermal comfort raises avenues for further investigation about how ‘normal life’ and the ‘good life’ are materialised and made. She is also interested in energy prosumption because increasing microgeneration is often assumed to be a component of future homes, yet there is little research on the experience of living with these altered material arrangements. Overall, she hopes to be part of a discussion around new methodologies (including netnography) and ‘steering’ future practices to be more sustainable.