Professor Elizabeth Shove
Lancaster University (UK)
The Dynamics and Hydraulics of Everyday Life
In the UK and in other countries too, water industry managers and regulators work hard to produce a reliable supply of reliably standardised water good enough to drink. With this as their focus, it is no wonder that water is routinely viewed as a uniform commodity or that initiatives to reduce demand are designed and implemented with reference to average per capita consumption of this seemingly generic resource.
In this presentation I argue that such approaches obscure crucial differences between one end use and another and blot out relevant variations in water-related habits and conventions. In the home, in action and in use, water is better understood as an impressively flexible element implicated in the effective reproduction of a range of services (cleaning, gardening, showering etc.) each of which has its own distinctive dynamic.
l use research into recent responses to water shortages in the UK to illustrate these points and explore the practical and theoretical implications of focusing not on water but on the services and practices it makes possible.
Biography
Elizabeth Shove is Reader in the Dept of Sociology at Lancaster University in the UK, and author of Comfort, Cleanliness + Convenience. Her address will explore the practical and theoretical implications of focusing not on water but on the services and practices it makes possible.
Email:e.shove@lancaster.ac.uk