The sustainable housing question: On the role of interpersonal, impersonal and professional trust in low-carbon retrofit decisions by homeowners

Trust is critical for facilitating energy transitions in both general and market exchange, and most particularly in consumer engagement. However, little research has been done to demonstrate how trust is established and how it influences the decision-making process of important change agents in energy transitions. On the basis of 40 in-depth interviews with homeowners who adopted a domestic low-carbon retrofit measure, this paper distinguishes three modes of trust that play a role in a retrofit decision-making process. First, interpersonal trust builds on the familiarity and social identification within social networks. Second, impersonal trust develops through certified tools and standards generated by governmental bodies and other actors perceived as independent. Finally, professional trust arises due to the perceived professional capacities and ethics of supply-side actors in the construction industry, and insulation and installation businesses. The paper demonstrates the various roles that modes of trust have in the decision-making process. Moreover, the paper shows the interaction between these different modes of trust and their mediators. Tailoring domestic low-carbon retrofit campaigns and services to different modes of trust is imperative in order to persuade homeowners to retrofit their homes, to engage with energy issues and to contribute to a transition to sustainable housing.</p

Feminised concern or feminist Care? Reclaiming gender normativities in zero waste living

Growing awareness of environmental issues and their relation to consumption patterns has givenrise to calls for sustainable consumption across the globe. In this article, we focus on the zerowaste lifestyle movement, which targets high-consumption households in the Global North as asite of change for phasing out waste in global supply chains. Our article is concerned with askinghow gender and household sustainability are mutually constituted in the zero waste lifestylemovement. We establish an analytical tension between understanding zero waste living as afurther intensification of feminised responsibility for people and the planet and as offering potentialfor transformational change – as feminised concern or feminist care. Through qualitative contentanalysis of the 10 most influential zero waste blogs globally, we show how the five zero wasterules of conduct – refuse, reduce, reuse, recycle, and rot – guide consumers towards everydayand situated engagements with waste. Organised by three cross-cutting themes – communingwith nature, organising time, and spending money – we present the normativities these rules callinto being for reconfiguring domestic activities such as cooking, cleaning, and grocery shopping. Inthe discussion, we draw out the implications of zero waste living’s emerging, contradictory gendernormativities, while recalling the political economy in which it is situated, namely a neoliberal,postfeminist landscape. We identify a continued feminisation of domestic responsibilities that isuncontested in zero waste living but also explore the progressive potential of waste-free livingto bring collective, naturecultural worlds into being as part of domestic environmental labour. FSW - Global Connections --- Ou

Gender and the heat pump transition

Decarbonisation in moderate and cold climates is reliant on the replacement of existing heating technologies with electric heat pumps. Heat pumps work differently from incumbent technologies, including in how they are controlled, their distribution of heat around the home and their space requirements. Despite evidence that domestic practices and interests associated with women played an important role in previous heating transitions, policy and research have not yet considered how heat pumps might interact with traditionally gendered needs and concerns. This could have significant implications for the success of the heat pump transition. This synthesis uses a framework of evidenced heating needs, incorporating wellbeing, resources, ease of use and relational dynamics, to structure a narrative literature review on how experiences of heat pumps may be gendered. Indicative evidence suggests that heat pumps have the potential to improve female thermal comfort, but that other possibly gendered heating needs such as minimising perceived waste and easy controllability are not always addressed. Amidst a lack of empirical studies exploring women’s needs, and whether they are met by heat pumps, a series of recommendations is provided for multidisciplinary research on the topic and to enhance consideration of gendered needs and experiences in policy development

The European Commission’s Green Deal is an opportunity to rethink harmful practices of research and innovation policy

The European Union’s Green Deal and associated policies, aspiring to long-term environmental sustainability, now require economic activities to ‘do no significant harm’ to EU environmental objectives. The way the European Commission is enacting the do no significant harm principle relies on quantitative tools that try to identify harm and adjudicate its significance. A reliance on established technical approaches to assessing such questions ignores the high levels of imprecision, ambiguity, and uncertainty—levels often in flux—characterizing the social contexts in which harms emerge. Indeed, harm, and its significance, are relational, not absolute. A better approach would thus be to acknowledge the relational nature of harm and develop broad capabilities to engage and ‘stay with’ the harm. We use the case of European research and innovation activities to expose the relational nature of harm, and explore an alternative and potentially more productive approach that departs from attempts to unilaterally or uniformly claim to know or adjudicate what is or is not significantly harmful. In closing, we outline three ways research and innovation policy-makers might experiment with reconfiguring scientific and technological systems and practices to better address the significant harms borne by people, other-than-human beings, and ecosystems

Multiple novel prostate cancer susceptibility signals identified by fine-mapping of known risk loci among Europeans

Genome-wide association studies (GWAS) have identified numerous common prostate cancer (PrCa) susceptibility loci. We have fine-mapped 64 GWAS regions known at the conclusion of the iCOGS study using large-scale genotyping and imputation in 25 723 PrCa cases and 26 274 controls of European ancestry. We detected evidence for multiple independent signals at 16 regions, 12 of which contained additional newly identified significant associations. A single signal comprising a spectrum of correlated variation was observed at 39 regions; 35 of which are now described by a novel more significantly associated lead SNP, while the originally reported variant remained as the lead SNP only in 4 regions. We also confirmed two association signals in Europeans that had been previously reported only in East-Asian GWAS. Based on statistical evidence and linkage disequilibrium (LD) structure, we have curated and narrowed down the list of the most likely candidate causal variants for each region. Functional annotation using data from ENCODE filtered for PrCa cell lines and eQTL analysis demonstrated significant enrichment for overlap with bio-features within this set. By incorporating the novel risk variants identified here alongside the refined data for existing association signals, we estimate that these loci now explain ∼38.9% of the familial relative risk of PrCa, an 8.9% improvement over the previously reported GWAS tag SNPs. This suggests that a significant fraction of the heritability of PrCa may have been hidden during the discovery phase of GWAS, in particular due to the presence of multiple independent signals within the same regio

The Material practices of quantification: Measuring ‘deprivation’ in the Amsterdam Neighbourhood Policy

The use of indicators and indexes in social policy, as part of evidence-based policy, is understood by governmentality scholars as ‘techniques of governance’. However, we know very little about how the process of quantification is enacted in the material practices that constitute social policy itself. In this article we focus on a particular quantified object: the ‘Normal Amsterdam Level’ (NAP), used in an Amsterdam Neighbourhood Policy programme. We follow the NAP from its birth, to its life and its afterlife. We show that the qualification ‘deprived’ calls forth a whole set of problematic arrangements which are lost in a process of quantification. We understand the NAP as a generative device that actively assembles and arranges the world. These assemblages are rendered ‘hard’ through semiotic, statistical and visual techniques that produce facts about targeted neighbourhoods in relation to a city-wide average, thus serving as evidence and legitimisation for policy interventions

Rats claiming rights? More‐than‐human acts of denizenship in Amsterdam

The anthropology of citizenship has sought to understand citizenship beyond formal-legal definitions, including a focus on how those who are legally without citizenship rights also engage in everyday acts of political claims-making. While this emphasis on the enactment of citizenship has expanded our understanding of who counts as a political being, it has also been obviously human centered. Might we also understand animals’ acts, their presence and movements, as having the potential to constitute political constituents? This article develops a more-than-human perspective on political claims-making by connecting insights from human-animal studies to the anthropology of citizenship. We draw on research on rats in Amsterdam to propose an understanding of these animals’ interventions in the urban built environment as more-than-human “acts of denizenship.” Focusing on different forms of rat behavior, we analyze rats’ mundane interactions and relations with the city's residents, infrastructure, and other animals as forms of claims-making. We see the behavior as efforts that are partially recognized by humans and that, as such, can be understood as enacting a relation of denizenship. Such attention to how rats act in and on urban space, we suggest, can help us conceptualize political agency and the formation of political belonging in ways that extend beyond the human. Global Challenges (FSW

Digital Amsterdam:Digital Art and Public Space in Amsterdam

In this report we explore digital art interventions in public space in Amsterdam as part of the ‘participatory public space’ project lead by the University of Melbourne. We focus specifically on artistic interventions in public space, rather than on the more general ways in which public space is transformed by digital technologies: it is in these artistic interventions that the most radical innovations take place. This becomes the case, for instance, in augmented reality interventions—a technique in which smartphones render visible interventions in the virtual world. Of particular interest is the way these interventions redefine public space and participation