Matt Watson is a Senior Lecturer in Human Geography at the University of Sheffield, UK. He was previously a researcher at Durham University, after completing a PhD in the Centre for Science Studies at Lancaster University.
Matt’s research engages everyday futures by seeking to understand the systemic relations between everyday practices, technologies, spaces and institutions to advance understandings of social change in relation to sustainability. Empirically, this work has encompassed energy, food, waste, and personal mobility. Current research focuses on relating infrastructural change to energy demand, and understanding the energy-food-water nexus in relation to consumption.
Dan Welch is a Research Associate at the Sustainable Consumption Institute, University of Manchester, where he obtained a PhD in Sociology, looking at the professional field of sustainability communications. He was previously a researcher with the Sustainable Practices Research Group.
Dan’s work has primarily focused on novel articulations of theories of practice for the study of sustainable consumption. Projects of sustainable consumption, whether at the level of policy or of personal ethical commitments, inherently involve imaginaries of everyday futures. Dan is interested to explore how teleology and emotion are bound together in practices oriented towards imagined futures of everyday consumption, and how ‘futures’ expertise (such as foresight and horizon scanning practices) helps construct such imagined futures.
Rebecca Wright completed her PhD at Birkbeck College, University of London in 2016, where she worked on energy in early-twentieth century American thought. Between 2014-15 she was a Research Fellow on the AHRC collaborative project “Material Cultures of Energy: Transitions, Disruptions and Everyday Life in the Twentieth Century”.
Her interest in everyday futures emerged from her work on the AHRC collaborative project ‘Material Cultures of Energy’, where she led the research strand on ‘Energy Futures’. As part of this project, her research focussed on the shifting position assigned to households, end-users and demand in energy forecasts across the twentieth century. It explored the impact that changing models of expertise, political ideologies, social actors, institutional frameworks, and cultural norms of consumption had on forecasts and the social spaces into which they fed. She will continue to explore the social life of energy futures as part of the everyday futures network, focussing, in particular, on the disciplinary, institutional and political factors that structure individual and collective futures.