the (un-)networked home: the disconnected flows, re...
TRANSCRIPT
The (un-)networked home: the disconnected flows, re-assembled conduits, and re-configured mobilities
of off-grid dwellings
August 21, 2013, 13.00-15.00
Preview
• The research project • Off-gridders’ motives • Slower homes • Onerous consumption • The new quietism • From DIY to DIW • Involvement and affect • The Thoreau effect • The mobilities of power • Q & A
Research questions
• Why does someone choose to live off-grid?
• How does one live off-grid?
• How do off-gridders accomplish comfort and convenience in their everyday life?
Definition
• Off-grid refers to a home, or entire community, disconnected from the electricity and natural gas infrastructure servicing a region (Government of Canada).
• Off-grid homes are, in practice, disconnected from several other networks as well.
Fields, goals, and objectives
• Situated in sociology, geography, and cultural studies.
• Key fields: mobilities, energy, domestic spaces, technology, everyday life, sense of place, affect.
• Greater goal: to contribute to academic knowledge and public education on the everyday use of renewable energy.
Data collection
• 26 months
• All of Canada’s 10 provinces and 3 territories
• Trivia: 52 flights, circa 65,000 kms
• 99 sites, 175 interviewees
• Inclusive of participation, short stays, visits
• Visual and audio recording
• Diverse sample sociologically and geographically
Dissemination
• Forthcoming book with Routledge
• 3 chapters in edited books
• Articles in Transfers; Body & Society; Environment & Planning A; Food, Culture, and Society; Environment & Planning D; Cultural Geographies; Journal of Consumer Culture.
• Photography exhibits.
• Extensive number of articles for popular media.
• Feature documentary film. Early trailer.
Motives
• Not everyone “chooses” to live off-grid.
• Many rural properties face huge connecting costs.
• The presentation today focuses on individual households rather than entire communities.
Motives
• Motives are very diverse.
• A partial list includes:
• sustainability
• the sense of challenge
• independence/autonomy
• resilience
• practical concerns (e.g. health, costs, convenience, legality).
Motives
• Though off-gridders embrace voluntary simplicity, their lifestyle is not so clearly voluntary.
• It is also not at all a simple thing!
• We problematize voluntarism and instrumental rationality.
Motives
• Frugality, sustainability, self-sufficiency, resiliency, thriftiness, etc. make up the voluntary simplicity philosophy.
• “Voluntary” refers to a deliberate choice: a realization or awakening leading to a value-driven conversion.
• “Simplicity,” refers to a drastic willed curtailment of the so-called unnecessary complications of everyday life.
Motives
• Simplicity is about modesty, but it is not to be confused with poverty. Simplicity consists of choices, such as:
• to buy less, • to consume sustainably and ethically, • to eat more local and natural foods, • to reduce clutter, to recycle and re-use, • to practice creativity, • to take a more active role in self-education, • to use renewable energy resources, • to reduce use of fossils fuels, • to prefer smaller-scale forms of living, • to develop skills based on values of self-reliance.
Motives
• The “pull of remove” is an affective force.
• Remove refers to a spatial performance of self-distancing.
• Remove is a set of practices of a distinct lifestyle disconnected from, or alternatively connected, to a hegemonic counterpart.
Motives
• The practice of remove is a “tactical” move that alters, disrupts, and re-signifies relations with an exteriority without really changing it.
• Off-gridders actively perform a symbolic and material distance from cosmopolitan consumerism.
• Through their “involuntary complexities” they also challenge the logic of dependence on light, speed, and power typical of modern life.
Motives
• Off-gridders’ quest for de-centralization and self-reliance stands as a contestation of large scale development, the fetishism of growth, distant supply mechanisms, and reliance on professional/expert authority.
• This quest characterizes the off-grid lifeworld not as a utopian space of political transformation but rather as a quietist, heterotopic, and relational space: a re-staging, from below (see Jensen 2013) of a greater energy design.
• Motives reveal hopes, failures, aspirations, idyllic pleasures, affective pulls, struggles, ironies, disillusions, compromises.
• Thus not just chronicles of free choice, morally superior political practices, or the carefree pleasures of simplicity.
Slower homes
• Off-grid homes use batteries, but batteries are no magic wand.
• Generators, when present, are also no easy solution to inclement weather.
• Dark and cloudy skies tend to seriously affect the everyday lives of off-grid homes in ways that most of us are hardly able to imagine.
Slower homes
• Off-grid homes move slower.
• Their distinct rhythms are due to their lifestyle choices and the temporalities of the natural events and technologies shaping their homes.
• Grid-tied homes can operate in relative asynchrony with weather, seasons, and with natural cycles of light and darkness.
• Off-grid homes function in greater synchrony.
Slower homes
• The slower ways of off-grid living show the importance of a dimension of slowness based on kairos.
• Kairos means an opportunistic or a propitious time to do something.
• The word “opportunistic” derives from the original denotation of opportunus: a combination of ob- (in the direction of) and portus (harbour).
• Opportunistic refers to a skilled, knowledgeable, and strategic person who seizes the right moment to achieve one’s goals.
• Being opportunistic means being efficient too.
Slower homes
• Debbie and David’s home: 300 Watts (solar), no generator, and no propane.
• The city is close and within commuting distance for Debbie, who owns an organic food store there.
• The couple have been off-grid in their 125 acre organic farm, 1200 square foot home, for twenty years now.
Slower homes
• David and Debbie are in their 60s but are unafraid of hard physical work. “We cut most of our wood ourselves,” David says, “we don’t need to join the gym.”
• Passive solar design and two cords of locally-collected wood per year is all they need to reach thermal comfort.
• Most of the firewood is burned in a masonry stove which serves as the hearth of the house.
• This creates the conditions for some slow-cooking in the kitchen: “It takes about 15 minutes to fire up the stove and get the water boiling for tea,”
Slower homes
• They are busy, but they do not live hurried lives.
• “We rise with the sun and go to bed early at night.”
• “Summer days are longer and busier with farming,” David finds, “when you live off-grid you really change your routines with the movements of the sun; you can’t be in a rush.”
• While Debbie can work in town up to five days a week, their home is in a temporal space removed from the rhythms of the city.
• The limited electricity available means there is no computer in the home, no internet, no satellite TV.
Slower homes
• Many theories has decried the consequences of the heightened speed of modern lifestyles.
• Grids have left indelible marks on the timescapes of modernity.
• Thus slow tourism, slow food, amenity migration, and slow urban living have arisen.
• “Slow living,” Parkins (2004: 364) notes, derives from “a commitment to occupy time more attentively,” investing time “with significance through attention and deliberation,” and “engaging in ‘mindful’ rather than ‘mindless’ practices” in order to “differentiate [our]selves from the dominant culture of speed.”
Slower homes
• Off-grid homes are not slower because they are un-electrified or un-digitized.
• It would anyhow be a mistake to impute clear deterministic effects on the impact of these technologies.
• Also, labour-saving appliances are known to have limited effects on everyday feelings of time pressure.
• Instead, off-grid homes are slower because of off-gridders’ uniquely opportunistic and efficient power synchronicity
• This is a synchronicity of domestic energy production and consumption with their everyday rhythms and the rhythms of the sky.
Slower homes
• In the off-grid lifeworld the sky’s darkness is a concrete and lived occurrence as well as a planned-for affective possibility: a space of anticipation (Edensor 2012; Thrift 2004).
• If today the sky is overcast David and Debbie will act accordingly in order to draw less power and have some more left for tomorrow.
• What truly affects off-gridders’ energy conservation practices is not the likelihood of a blackout, but its affective significance.
• To run out of power would be equivalent to being unprepared, unskilled, greedy, and unable to practice self-sufficiency.
• Off-gridders embrace the idea that the renewable energy one can accumulate is enough and that one should make do with it.
Onerous consumption
• “You have to want this way of living, you have to want it enough because there is no ‘push-button instant technology, you have to work with nature,” Sue explains.
• “It’s all about consumption,” Simon finds. “It’s not hard to reduce what you consume, but there has to be a certain amount of self-control and self-discipline involved.”
• “People want their housing to be easy,” Sue remarks, “but the key is to be observant and mindful” if you want to conserve.
• To be mindful, observant, and involved sounds like a burden to most of us.
• But the “burden,” to people like Simon and Sue, is a pleasant one, something they endure as much as they embrace and enjoy.
Onerous consumption
• For most of us water remains taken for granted and of limited concern—save for the rare times of trouble.
• Water sources, its distribution, and the infrastructures dedicated to its collection and treatment tend to remain separate from our ordinary mode of engagement.
• But what happens when water becomes the subject of ordinary consumption?
• What happens when the collection, storage, channeling, and usage of water shift from distant assemblages operating in the background to immediate concerns with dramatic consequences?
Onerous consumption
• Brian and Gina’s water comes from a twenty-foot tall, wooden water tower which hosts a 250-gallon cistern that collects rainwater harvested from the roof.
• Gravity feeds water down to a hose used to fill buckets.
• The buckets are then carried wherever needed. • On shower days Brian and Gina place a bucket on
top of the woodstove and warm it up. • They then take the bucket and dump the warm
water into a field shower bag hung high above their heads.
Onerous consumption
• Off-gridders’ entanglements with water constitute a type of onus: a burden, but an enjoyable one, and a treasured responsibility of (relative) self-sufficiency.
• We refer to their engagement with water as onerous consumption: a type of consumption characterized by wilfully chosen burdensome involvement.
• Though it is the source of some degree of inconvenience, toil, and occasionally technical problems this onus is uniformly appreciated by all off-gridders
• It is indeed recognized to be a fulfilling moral responsibility and even a treasured privilege of their chosen lifestyle.
Onerous consumption
• Onerous consumption depends on the consumer’s involvement in the process of collecting, storing, channeling, and disposing of resources.
• It unfolds through practical ways of incorporating an environment’s features into the typical mode of everyday life.
• Such incorporation requires “attentive engagement” and a revealing “exploratory quest for knowledge” through which “persons enter actively into the constitution of their environments” (Ingold, 2000: 57).
Onerous consumption
• Onerous consumption is marked by a deep involvement in the process of procurement of the subject matter of consumption.
• To “procure” is to exercise skill, attention, practical knowledge, sensitivity, and adaptability in the process of obtaining resources, materials, and goods (Ingold, 2000: 58-59).
• The objects of onerous consumption are anything but ready-made, omnipresent and always available, or taken-for-granted and given.
• Onerous consumption is rather a “taskscape” and “a project that has continually to be worked at” (Ingold, 2000: 97).
Onerous consumption
• Onerous consumption is not an ascetic experience. • Onerous consumption may be understood to be typical of the
alternative hedonist lifestyle portrayed by Soper (2007, 2008, 2009).
• Alternative hedonists pursue the enjoyment of life’s pleasures, but do so in distinctly reflexive and socially and environmentally conscious ways (Soper, Ryle, and Thomas, 2009).
• As Soper (2009: 3) explains: “alternative hedonism is premised on the idea that even if consumerism were indefinitely sustainable it would not enhance human happiness and well-being.” […]
• “And it points to new forms of desire, rather than fears of ecological disaster, as the most likely motivating force in any shift towards a more sustainable economic order.”
The new quietism
• Despite their refusal to connect to electricity, water, natural gas, sewage, and other networks, most off-gridders have… web access!
• Short prelude to QUIETism…
• It is not crickets we hear, but actually “spring peepers”: small frogs.
• The point: most off-gridders are not hermits, but rather “new quietists.”
The new quietism
• Jim and Judy are from Guelph, Ontario, near Toronto.
• They escaped here shortly after 9/11, fed up with their “meaningless” lives filled with Saturday afternoon car washes, careers, and empty preoccupations with matching countertop colors and kitchen accessories.
• “I found my lifestyle in the suburbs too…” Judy ponders, “robotic; as if we were part of a cult, without wanting to be part of it.”
The new quietism
• They bought their site on PEI from the internet, on a whim, and quit their jobs.
• Cleared the acreage and built off-grid, making space for equine-assisted therapy and eco-tourism.
• Set up a minimal capacity system, which forced to make serious lifestyle adjustments.
The new quietism
• Jim and Judy are what anthropologists, geographers, and sociologists call lifestyle or amenity migrants.
• Amenity migrants move not out of economic necessity but out of choice for a different lifestyle, wishing to start over, and to reinvent themselves.
• These often highly educated and relatively well-off individuals are known to move to gentler and warmer places, often far and abroad.
• But the promise of a new lifestyle can be sought even in cold places found within one’s own country and…
The new quietism
• …even a few miles away from one’s birthplace.
• The key move? Disconnection.
• Disconnection is a practice of “non-use.”
• Non-users are non-adopters of a particular technology: people who choose not to own or utilize a consumer object or service.
The new quietism
• “Lines” (Ingold 2007) are what off-gridders choose not to use.
• These lines bind us to one another and make our everyday existence rather comfortable and convenient…
• …but also dependent on the operation of distant infrastructures whose complex functioning escapes our comprehension and control.
• It is this complexity, this anonymous un-involvement, and this (costly) dependence that off-gridders reject.
• By selectively severing these ties off-gridders de-territorialize their homes, migrating away, and constituting in their place safe-haven “islands”.
The new quietism
• Islands are spaces whose access is limited and restricted, but still guaranteed on ad hoc basis.
• But islands are never truly, utterly disconnected.
• Like islands, off-grid households are places materially and symbolically removed and kept distinct from the rest of the world, though not separate.
• Off-grid homes are spaces carved out of strategic patterns of mobility and immobility that only partially shut off the rest of the world.
The new quietism
• Similar to the “hippie” generation who “dropped out” of mainstream society (see Young 1973), today’s off-gridders disconnect from “the grid” to take control of their personal lives.
• “Quietism” is the label Young (1973) applied to back-to-the-landers who sought personal peace in rural refuges and who abdicated their former activist commitments to social change.
• Within both Christianity and Islam Quietism refers to a retreatist withdrawal from political affairs motivated by disinterest and/or skepticism in one’s ability to affect change.
• Instead of open rebellion toward heresy and instead of militantly pushing for collective amelioration, religious Quietists generally sought personal serenity by way of contemplative stillness.
• In the case of non-religious back-to-the-landers Godly devotion was substituted by variably intense pantheist forms of mysticism.
The new quietism
• In their diverse ways off-gridders have obvious Quietist-like tendencies, starting from the very appreciation of peace and quiet.
• Disenchanted with mainstream living, neo-liberalism, consumerism, large institutions, the power of the state to affect change, and even many of the available political counter-hegemonies, off-gridders seek personal contentment by “islanding” themselves.
• In these spaces they first and foremost take care of their own existence by cultivating peace and quiet, and by rarely engaging in direct, collective struggles.
DIW
• How do off-gridders manage to live like they do? Through a great deal of “DIW.”
DIW
• We know little about “DIY” (i.e. do-it-yourself) home-builders.
• The consumer interested in doing it oneself these days has the ability to source knowledge from a bottomless pile of DIY sources.
• Thus, in actuality DIY is really nothing but DIW—doing it with others.
• DIW reveals a great deal about how off-gridders build their homes, highlighting the practice of collaborating not only with humans, but also with non-human actors: materials and spaces endowed with a regenerative potential of their own.
DIW
• No one builds on their own.
• The expression “do-it-yourself” connotes an individualistic, self-reliant, self-sufficient orientation.
• DIW posits individuals as social agents who do not break away from, or openly contest, greater forces, but rather articulate with such forces through different associative relations, different “entanglements.”
DIW
• “I like to be able to do everything, repair everything, make everything myself,” says Hélène.
• “Life is full of challenges,” she observes, “I prefer the ones that I know where they’re coming from. If you build your own house and there’s a leak in the roof then you know why and how to fix it. If I didn’t know where my water is coming from then I wouldn’t feel…secure,” she confides, “that’s why in this house there is no essential element that needs electricity to function, we’re not dependent on anything in particular.” Everything vital can always be done some other way, she explains, by applying a practical ethos of re-purposing, re-combining, and re-using.
DIW
• Hélène and Alain’s earthship-like home was built by ramming dirt and sand into discarded motor vehicle tires.
• The tires were packed and stacked on top of one another to form walls and then plastered over.
• Tires are easy to build with and provide remarkable thermal mass—slowly absorbing and releasing warmth when packed with earth, stabilizing indoor comfort.
• Earthships were invented and trademarked by maverick US architect Michael Reynolds, who famously touted their passive solar advantage, cost-effectiveness, potential for energy autonomy, and reliance on abundantly available resources.
DIW
• Our analysis hinges on the concept of regenerative life skills: the capacity to create sustainably by improvising with the affordances of whatever materials are at hand.
• The first influence is John Lyle’s regenerative design theory: • using information and place-specific knowledge instead of interventionist,
place-altering power; • benefiting from what nature freely provides and working with it, rather
than in spite of it; • matching technology and building design to actual need; • searching for multiple pathways to a building problem; • prioritizing sustainability; • drawing from lessons from the past; • adjusting the form of one’s building to the existing characteristics of place
and the flows occurring within it; • and aggregating rather than isolating. • Building is not an exercise in imposing one’s solitary vision and will on an
object but rather a set of practices resulting in numerous entanglements.
DIW
• The idea of building as entangling, or weaving, brings us to recognize our second debt, which is toward Ingold.
• According to Ingold life is a “creative unfolding of an entire field of relations within which beings emerge and take the particular forms they do, each in relation to the others.”
• Life, in other words, contains the potential for its own regeneration. • Living beings’ capacity to give continuous re-birth to themselves
and to the forms of their activity must therefore consist in harnessing those unfolding processes and carrying them forward.
• A regenerative life skill is thus about the “education of attention” towards meanings immanent in the lifeworld.
• “Only if we are capable of dwelling,” Heidegger might put it, “only then we can build.”
Involvement
• Living off-grid demands a great degree of mindfulness, awareness, and bodily involvement.
• Involvement can be defined as participatory engagement within a process. Take heating, for example:
• Whereas on-grid heating is something we might metaphorically call a “cool” energy, off-grid heating is something we might label a “hot” energy.
• Hot energies demand greater intensities of participation into socio-technical and spatio-temporal processes than cool energies do.
• This involvement is an expression of the capacity of bodies to be affected by and affect ordinary sensations such as thermoception.
• Because involvement in these processes is transformative we conceptualize it as catalytic.
Involvement
• Net Zero building is a type of design characterized by an equal balance between the energy consumed and produced on site.
• Conrad’s home is off the natural gas grid but still on the provincial electricity grid as a back-up.
• This results in the reduction of a potentially large carbon footprint because in Alberta coal is dominant.
• As a downtown urban resident he has a key advantage over his rural counterparts:
• “I can walk or bike to work or to the most of the stores where I need to shop, and I can take public transit to reach mostly everything else,” he explains, “whereas in the country you need to get in your car every time you need to go somewhere.”
• He also scavenges discarded wood.
Involvement
• Thermoception is a sense, but not a passive receptor but rather as an interface: “a dynamic trajectory by which we learn to register and become sensitive to what the world is made of” (Latour).
• If we understand thermoception as an interface, and therefore as a skill, a hub of activities (Ingold, 2000, 2011), a sensibility, and an orientation to modulate the world then we treat thermoception as a type of affect.
• Affect is a bodily pull and a push. Affect is the body’s capacity to be moved and be affected, and the body’s capacity to move and affect other people and other things.
• Thermoception is thus a nexus of intersecting practices and experiences through which different actors become entangled in the lifeworld.
• Thermoception, therefore, is an atmospheric attunement (see Stewart, 2011): an affective force that manifests itself in involvement in the lifeworld and in its transformation—a transformation we will call catalytic.
Involvement
• Ways of heating are common part of our ways of life. • Different ways of heating draw together different
assemblages comprised of different bodies of knowledge, skills, materials, and places.
• Ways of heating are individual and collective thermal accomplishments shaped by common habits, and even individual idiosyncrasies.
• Heating and thermoception are thus comprised of bodily practices and experiences inclusive of observing, controlling, recalling, regulating, and leaving traces (like carbon footprints), of their warming and cooling activities.
Involvement
• Off-gridders practice different ways of heating than on-grid dwellers.
• Collecting wood requires a good deal of physical activity. • Designing a passive solar home demands careful foresight. • Living in synchrony with seasonal patterns necessitates planning. • Relying on renewables and reducing the use of non-renewable
resources requires that off-gridders relinquish some conveniences. • In short, if energy—as its etymology tells us—is the capacity to do
work, then off-grid ways of heating demand the actualization of greater intensities of the capacity to do domestic, mundane work.
• To heat—or to become involved in to the process of bringing about warmth—therefore means to take part in practices through which heating skills are applied and developed, insightful observations are made, and understandings are refined.
Involvement
• Thermoceptive power has the capacity to affect us and—not unlike a woodstove’s catalytic converter—the capacity to affect the temperature of the air we inhabit.
• Thrift (2004) explains that affect is somewhat like the networks of pipes and cables that provide the basic conveniences and comforts of everyday life. Well, of on-grid everyday life, at least.
• Hot energies require a different “artful use of a vast sensorium of bodily resources” (Thrift, 2004: 60), in short: a greater bodily involvement.
• Hot energies demand a re-engineering of affect: a “skillful comportment” (Thrift, 2004: 70) through which off-gridders become intensely sensitive to changing thermal dynamics and intensely involved in manipulating their homes through their ways of heating.
The Thoreau Effect
• Physical comfort can be viewed as as an embodied affective sensibility (Bissell, 2008): being physically comfortable is an evaluative judgment of one’s sensory experience at a particular time and place.
• Comfort is also a quality attributed to material objects. • Comfort is also a prized feature. • Together with normative criteria of cleanliness and convenience,
notions of comfort shape how we value our dwellings and relate to them (Shove, 2003; Shove at al., 2008).
• Comfort is therefore not a neutral idea or universally objective condition. engineer it and normalize it (Shove, 2003; Shove at al., 2009) reflect directly on what people will consider comfortable and the practices they will undertake to achieve such desirable sensation.
The Thoreau Effect
• Thanks to non-mainstream lighting practices including use of passive solar design, propane fixtures, kerosene and candle lights, and DC, LED, and other low-wattage lighting, off-gridders live in conditions they find rich in visual comfort.
• The key to their practices is in an affective change in orientation that they operate as part of their lifestyle practices.
• We call this switch the Thoreau effect, which describes how one learns to appreciate the comfort of objects that one has assembled on one’s own.
The Thoreau Effect
• Off-gridders do not reject the value of comfort. • However, they achieve and experience comfort
on different terms by manipulating and transforming the distribution channels, productive technologies, and consumer objects that provide them with domestic comfort.
• The key to achieving various intensities and different kinds of off-grid comfort resides in off-gridders’ capacity to re-assemble the socio-technical system by which comfort is affected within their domestic life.
The Thoreau Effect
• The “Diderot Effect” refers to a process of upward-spiraling consumption sparked by the dissatisfaction with old possessions generated by acquisition of new goods.
• The Diderot Effect goes a long way to explaining the collective historical escalation of the quest for comfort as well.
• By the Thoreau Effect we refer to a transformation in a person’s orientation toward his/her capacity to affect comfort and be affected by material objects’ capacity to afford comfort.
• The Thoreau Effect captures a basic adaptive process, the process of learning to enjoy the comfort of whatever requires a great deal of personal effort.
The mobilities of power
• Power is quintessential to mobility, yet it hasn’t found secure place within mobility studies.
• By outlining the concept of power constellations and by beginning to dissect its components, we hopefully, can stimulate further study.
The mobilities of power
• Similar to Cresswell (2010) we apprehend a constellation as an assemblage of practices, experiences, and narratives that make sense together.
• Power moves and energy resources are moved around, thus they are subjects and object of practice.
• Power is experienced through sensations, feelings, emotions, moods, and affects.
• And power is talked about, mapped, politicized, debated, thus it is the matter of multiple representations.
• We understand all practices, experiences, and representations of, and about, power as inevitably entangled in more-than-human relations and therefore knotted in “meshworks” where everyday power is lived and differentially.
The mobilities of power
• We lay out ten components of power constellations.
• First, motive: why we need power and what we need it for.
The mobilities of power
• Second, route: Where does power come from? What route does power take to flow from its point of extraction, generation, and transformation to its points of utilization? What are the consequences of such as routes? Whom does such route exclude, and why?
The mobilities of power
• Third, cost: How much does it cost to utilize power, in all its various applications? How much wattage, and therefore money, does it cost to dry a load of clothes, to toast a slice of bread, to heat a poorly insulated bedroom, to keep a laptop plugged-in at night? How much does it cost to cook with propane vs. electricity? And how much do competing power-utilizing technologies cost to purchase?
The mobilities of power
• Fourth: Externalities
• The bills we pay are not power’s only costs. In fact, the socio-environmental consequences caused by extracting energy resources, channeling flows, and applying power to tackle ordinary tasks create short and long term costs that are often hidden, but no less meaningful than their financial counterparts.
The mobilities of power
• Fifth, pace: how fast can energy resources drain, and how quickly can they be replenished? How synchronized must processes of power utilization and generation be? At what type of rhythms do different power resources and technologies work? Do these rhythms work independently or interdependently from our own everyday routines? How long does it take to transform a certain energy resource into usable power?
The mobilities of power
• Sixth, availability: Availability is a matter of suitability and readiness for use. It is a matter of how easily and regularly obtainable something is. As well, availability may require skills for energy extraction and power generation, tacit and abstract knowledge, creativity, and improvisation, as well as planning, forethought, and capacity for conservation.
The mobilities of power
• Seventh, efficiency: how productive are different energy resources and forms of power generation, distribution, and application use? How adaptable are to different demands and context of use? How easy are they to use? How environmentally efficient and sustainable are they?
The mobilities of power
• Eight, frictions: “When and how does [the flow] stop?” Cresswell (2010, p. 26) asks about mobility. And what happens during these frictions, why do they occur, and how are they dealt with?
The mobilities of power
• Ninth, interconnectivity: How interconnected is an energy source? How independent of other energy sources is it, and of other people, and of other assemblages?
The mobilities of power
• Tenth, sensibility: the ability of sensation. Different power constellations give rise to places that feel different, entangled with different energy resources, different moorings and infrastructures, and different ways of living with forms of power.
Tak! Questions?