Telling the story of the energy transition: Empirical fiction and the busy-ness of everyday life.
Welcome to a talk with Dominic Hinde, lecturer in Sociology of Media at the University of Glasgow. He will be discussing with us the theories and methods that have resulted in his new book, Drifting North: Finding a Sustainable Future in Scotland's Past
We are collectively hunting for a story, more specifically a macro story that can shift us from a carbon economy to a decarbonised economy. Old habits and new truths brush against each other in the creation of the future, and there is a tension at the heart of social science research between its desire for empirical objectivism and its embrace of sociology as a narrative sense-making practice. Much has been written on the overlap between journalism, anthropology and ethnography and its potential to address this problematique, with scholars both embracing the confluence of and seeking to police the borders between these respective forms of praxis.
This discussion recounts an attempt to bridge this gap, combining affective storytelling with anthropological sensibilities in the production of a public narrative of climate and energy in Scotland. The result is the book Drifting North: Finding a Sustainable Future in Scotland's Past,which will be released this fall by Manchester University Press
Dominic Hinde
is Lecturer in Sociology of Media at the University of Glasgow, prior to which he worked at Queen Margaret University and the Institute for Advanced Study at the University of Edinburgh. He has a parallel career as a foreign correspondent and environmental journalism, including working for the BBC and Sveriges Radio.
