Christopher Groves

• PhD, MA (Dist), BA Hons (1st)
• Senior Lecturer at Swansea University

The phenomenon of technological hazards, whose existence is only revealed many years after they were initially produced, shows that the question of our responsibilities toward future generations is of urgent importance. However, the nature of technological societies means that they are caught in a condition of structural irresponsibility: the tools...

Understanding how and why practices may be transformed is vital for any transition towards socio-environmental sustainability. However, theorising and explaining the role of individual agency in practice change continues to present challenges. In this paper we propose that theories of practice can be usefully combined with a psychosocial framework...

Theorists have argued that environmental justice requires more than just the fair distribution of environmental benefits and harms. It also requires participation in environmental decisions of those affected by them, and equal recognition of their cultural identities, dimensions most clearly articulated in relation to indigenous struggles, where pa...

http://www.palgrave.com/page/detail/?K=9780230358843 In an age where issues like climate change and the unintended consequences of technological innovation are high on the ethical and political agenda, questions about the nature and extent of our responsibilities to future generations have never been more important, yet simultaneously so difficult...

Anticipation may be seen as structured by images and representations, an approach that has informed recent work in science and technology studies on the sociology of expectations. But anticipation, as a capacity or characteristic, is not solely manifested in the form of representations, even where such representations of the ‘not yet’ are performat...

How atmospheric pollution is perceived by urban dwellers has long been a topic of interest within geography and the social sciences, whether to draw attention to environmental injustices, to better understand the materialities and affects associated with polluted air, or to grasp how people ‘tune in’ to polluted matter. In this paper, we draw on th...

Decarbonizing energy systems is an ambitious sociotechnical project, and will have significant implications for social justice, given the increasing dependence of societies globally on energy services. Eliciting non-expert values and perspectives to help reflect on the desirability of visions of socio-technical change has long been promoted within...

Four decades on from the onset of deindustrialisation in the UK and other late-capitalist societies, industrial places are again emerging as key objects of policy discourse. Under the dual pressures of decarbonisation, and the recognition of ‘left behind’ regions as potential hotspots for feelings of political marginalisation, new strategies for cl...

With the public deeply embedded at the heart of the energy system, it is essential that any transition is shaped by what is socially acceptable/desirable at local levels, taking account of any existing vulnerabilities within the local community. In this paper, we present a detailed description of a novel method for exploring local energy systems ch...

Decarbonising the energy system means moving from a centralised, fossil fuel-dependent one to one based primarily on renewable energy. Visions of whole system change focus on socio-technical concepts like electrification and flexibility, rather than single technologies such as nuclear or solar. The role that technological niches might play in relat...

Decarbonising the energy system means moving from a centralised, fossil fuel-dependent one to one based primarily on renewable energy. Visions of whole system change focus on socio-technical concepts like electrification and flexibility, rather than single technologies such as nuclear or solar. The role that technological niches might play in relat...

Difficulties experienced in obtaining energy services have been represented as unjust because of how they can prevent people from realising primary human capabilities. Capabilities are relational, being embedded within complex interdependencies between people and socio-material systems. These complexities can cause problems for approaches to energy...

Energy system change is not just an abstract, system-level process. It depends on demonstration projects that are sited in specific places. Place attachment and socio-economic history are significant influences upon how publics evaluate such proposals, and thereby on how they view system change itself. A novel scenario- and place-based workshop met...

Energy vulnerability is an area of interest to researchers and policymakers alike. In this article we analyse data from a qualitative longitudinal interview study of a deprived ex-mining community in South Wales to explore lived experiences of energy vulnerability in detail. While demonstrating the relevance of caring responsibilities in experience...

Recent energy and social science scholarship has proposed the concept of energy vulnerability as a better and more inclusive indicator of energy injustice than dominant definitions of fuel poverty, which can exclude a range of households who nevertheless have difficulties accessing energy services. Energy vulnerability is defined as a propensity un...

The concept of ‘smart living’ is becoming increasingly prevalent in discussions about anticipated energy futures. However, despite the promises surrounding smart technology, take-up to-date has been relatively low, with existing research showing that concerns about it abound. Smart technology has also been positioned as potentially able to alleviat...

Inequalities in access to energy services are seen as unjust because of how they can prevent people from realising core human capabilities. Capabilities are inherently relational, being embedded within complex interdependencies between people and socio-material systems. These complexities can cause problems for approaches to energy justice that bas...

Entry for SAGE Research Methods Foundations, online publication forthcoming in 2020

The idea of a just energy transition to a decentralised, renewables-based energy system has recently gained much traction. Efforts to understand what may be involved raises notable questions however. In recent years, it has been suggested that energy vulnerability is a better and more inclusive indicator of energy injustice than dominant definition...

The connection between climate skepticism and climate denial and what has become known as post‐truth culture has become the subject of much interest in recent years. This has lead to intense debates among scientists and activists about how to respond to this changed cultural context and the ways in which it is held to obstruct wider acceptance of c...

Historically, concepts of sustainability have been articulated in response to a perceived crisis within central modernist narratives about progress. As such, they are not just environmental concepts, but ethical and political ones. At the same time, they have often been accused of being too wedded to many of the same assumptions as these central na...

To understand how the legacy of urban regeneration promised by events like the London 2012 Olympics is constructed, the masterplanning process is analysed as an assemblage of heterogeneous elements that construct futures as knowable and actionable objects in the present. Building on recent applications of actor-network theory to planning studies, t...

The need for energy system change in order to address the energy ‘trilemma’ of security, affordability and sustainability is well documented and requires the active involvement of individuals, families and communities who currently en- gage with these systems and technologies. Alongside technical developments designed to address these challenges, a...

Second generation biofuels derived from agricultural lignocellulosic waste represent what is hoped to be a significant technological, but also socio-economic advance beyond the shortcomings of first generation biofuels (chiefly bioethanol). The development of advanced catalytic techniques is a central part of making such technologies viable. Howeve...

Waste has often been a target of literature and policy promoting pro-environmental behaviour. However, little attention has been paid to how subjects interpret and construct waste in their daily lives. In this article we develop a synthesis of practice theory and psycho-social concepts of attachment and transitional space to explore how biographica...

Family and youth research has highlighted the importance of lifecourse transitions, illustrating how they can have a substantial impact on people’s everyday lives and anticipated futures. Given their apparent significance, it is surprising that relatively little attention has been paid to life transitions – particularly unexpected ones – to explore...

The RRI Tools project, funded under the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme (2007–2013), is an important attempt to translate key guiding principles of responsible research and innovation (RRI) into a compendium of best practices to assist researchers and practitioners. It has set up a valuable database of practical and other reference res...

In recent years, debates about energy justice have become increasingly prominent. However, the question of what is at stake in claims about energy justice or injustice is a complex one. Signifying more than simply the fair distribution of quantities of energy, energy justice also implies issues of procedural justice (participation) and recognition...

Extensive knowledge exists regarding how to comprehend the embeddedness of everyday energy usage and resultant demand trajectories within wider social and material contexts. Researchers have explored how people find themselves locked into everyday ways of using energy, and how energy systems have evolved to entangle together practices and sociotech...

Understanding how and why practices may be transformed is vital for any transition towards socio-environmental sustainability. However, theorising and explaining the role of individual agency in practice change continues to present challenges. In this paper we propose that theories of practice can be usefully combined with a psychosocial framework...

Anticipation may be seen as structured by images and representations, an approach that has informed recent work in science and technology studies on the sociology of expectations. But anticipation, as a capacity or characteristic, is not solely manifested in the form of representations, even where such representations of the ‘not yet’ are performat...

It has been argued that responsible research and innovation (RRI) requires critique of the ‘worlds’ implicated in the future imaginaries associated with new technologies. Qualitative social science research can aid deliberation on imaginaries by exploring the meanings of technologies within everyday practices, as demonstrated by Yolande Strengers’...

Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) has affirmed the value of ‘inclusion’ and ‘responsiveness’ as institutional virtues necessary to ensure that reflexivity towards the social priorities behind innovation processes is made possible. It is argued that this affirmation links RRI to knowledge politics in other domains (e.g. environmental justice...

Energy Biographies shows that, over time, changes in how people use energy are shaped by a range of influences that condition what people are able to be and to do. These link individual biographies, technological infrastructures, shared practices and community contexts in ways that have remained often hitherto unappreciated, and which the methodolo...

Existing work has demonstrated how the presence of children of different ages in families can impact on people’s ability to make imaginative connections to longer-term socio-environmental futures and maintain these links in the context of everyday pressures. This chapter explores such connections by presenting selected data extracts from residents...

In March 2014 a group of early career researchers and academics from São Paulo state and from the UK met at the University of Campinas to participate in a workshop on ‘ResponsibleInnovation and the Governance of Socially Controversial Technologies’. In this Perspective we describe key reflections and observations from the workshop discussions, payi...

The regulation of innovation reflects a specific imaginary of the role of governance that makes it external to the field it governs. It is argued that this decision and rule-based view of regulation is insufficient to deal with the inescapable uncertainties that are produced by innovation. In particular, using risk-based knowledge as the basis of r...

The problem of how to make the transition to a more environmentally and socially sustainable society poses questions about how such far-reaching social change can be brought about. In recent years, lifecourse transitions have been identified by a range of researchers as opportunities for policy and other actors to intervene to change how individual...

In UK energy policy, community-led energy initiatives are increasingly being imbued with transformative power to facilitate low carbon transitions. The ways that such expectations for communities are manifesting in practice remains, however, relatively poorly understood. In particular, key conceptual developments in unpacking what constitutes ‘comm...

Time is at the heart of understanding climate change, from the perspective of both natural and social scientists. This article selectively reviews research on time perception and temporal aspects of decision making in sociology and psychology. First we briefly describe the temporal dimensions that characterize the issue of climate change. Second, w...

Temporality is fundamental to qualitative longitudinal (QLL) research, inherent in the design of returning to participants over time, often to explore moments of change. Previous research has indicated that talking about the future can be difficult, yet there has been insufficient discussion of methodological developments to address these challenge...

Existing work has demonstrated how the presence of children of different ages in families can impact on people’s ability to make imaginative connections to longer-term socio-environmental futures and maintain these links in the context of everyday pressures. This chapter explores such connections by presenting selected data extracts from residents...

The work of the Energy Biographies research team (www.energybiographies.org) is creating spaces for people to reflect on how they use energy in everyday life, and to generate interesting narratives about how it might be possible for them to live more sustainably in the future. To do this, we are utilising an innovative set of case study, qualitativ...

Standfirst: Climate change communication is trapped between the norms that govern scientific practice and the need for public debate. Overcoming this tension requires new societal institutions where the science and politics of climate change can co-exist. Over more than two decades, a substantial body of social science research has generated a rang...

Lifecourse transitions, it has been suggested, may represent ‘transformative moments’ that can ‘provoke self-reflection and “unlocking” of habits’ (Hards, 2012) and lead to the remodelling of practices. There has thus been significant interest in the potential of such moments for catalysing shifts from unsustainable to more sustainable lifestyles....

In March 2014 a group of early career researchers and academics from São Paulo state and from the UK met at the University of Campinas to participate in a workshop on ‘Responsible Innovation and the Governance of Socially Controversial Technologies’. In this Perspective we describe key reflections and observations from the workshop discussions, pay...

Time is at the heart of understanding climate change, from the perspective of both natural and social scientists. This article selectively reviews research on time perception and temporal aspects of decision making in sociology and psychology. First we briefly describe the temporal dimensions that characterize the issue of climate change. Second, w...

Morality, Alasdair McIntyre has suggested, always presupposes a sociology, an implicit interpretation of how society is constituted and structured, and with it conceptions of the social constraints that mould the subjectivity — the agentive capacities and cognitive-psychological make-up — of those who belong to it. Margaret Urban Walker has suggest...

We began this book by examining the obstacles that industrialised, technological societies present to thinking about responsibilities to future people, at the same time as they place the question of what these responsibilities might be and how to fulfil them firmly on the philosophical and political agenda. The difficulties we encounter when trying...

At the end of the previous chapter, we asked whether the imperative to care for the future can encompass more than the futures of whatever specific objects of attachment we simply happen to care about. We may readily agree that the fact of attachment gives rise to a responsibility to care for whatever object of attachment one is concerned with. But...

Before developing further the implications of the care perspective, I begin this chapter by reviewing the argument made in Part I, together with the key points of contrast between the care and administrative imaginaries that have emerged in Chapter 5. The world in which we are faced with trying to understand the moral significance of our relationsh...

‘All my reason’s interest’, states Immanuel Kant (1996, A804–5/B832–3), ‘is united in the following three questions: What can I know? What ought I to do? What may I hope?’ In Chapter 1, it was suggested that, whatever else is taken to be characteristic of humans as a species, being concerned about how an intrinsically uncertain future will unfold i...

In Chapter 1, we saw how the forms of ethical life characteristic of technological societies place foresight, due diligence about the future, at the centre of concepts of responsibility. At the same time, the sheer success of industrialised technological innovation in transforming the world renders foresight inadequate to the task of anticipating t...

Systematic discussions of intergenerational justice (IJ) are a relatively recent feature of Western moral philosophy stretching back at least to Frank P. Ramsey (1928), although brief discussions are present in the work of other figures such as David Hume and Henry Sidgwick. Outside this tradition, other cultures have produced codified consideratio...

When entering on a discussion of obligations, three questions tend to be asked: to whom are we obliged, what do we owe them, and how do we discharge these obligations? When it comes to future generations, moral and political philosophy has often found itself in a quandary, and indeed has encountered problems in answering all three of these question...

Understanding genomic susceptibility risk has been represented as key to a new era of personalized medicine, in which “empowered” individuals shape their lives according to a “somatic ethics” of genetic risk management. Based on a comprehensive analysis of websites and other documents produced by key companies within the personal genomics industry,...

The sociology of expectations has examined ways in which future expectations shape how technological options are selected and stabilised. Personal genomic susceptibility testing (PGST) is introduced as an example of a technology where expectations serve a crucial role, thanks to the inherently future-oriented nature of testing for genetic susceptib...

The future social value of nanoscale science and technology (NST) has been repeatedly represented as revolutionary. However, government and industry support for the commercialisation of NST has to confront four key areas of uncertainty: concerning potential hazards associated with applications, commercial viability, public acceptance and evolving r...

To decide what responsible innovation means, it is necessary to understand the ethical significance of innovation as a kind of action that can significantly alter the natural and social worlds and the human condition. It is often assumed that such changes are introduced responsibly only if we act with foresight, by striving to predict the consequen...

Development of effective participatory mechanisms within infrastructure planning governance has been dependent on how far the outputs of participatory processes have an impact upon strategic policy priorities. However, neoliberal modes of governance are characterised by 'recentralisation' within arms-length regulatory bodies and private corporation...

Responsible research and innovation (RRI) has emerged as a response to the problem of the unintended consequences of new technologies, one with an agenda shaped by concerns about the impact of technological innovation on issues of procedural and substantive justice. The role of future imaginaries, manifest in texts and images, in shaping innovation...

The sociology of expectations has examined ways in which future expectations shape how technological options are selected and stabilised. Personal genomic susceptibility testing (PGST) is introduced as an example of a technology where expectations serve a crucial role, thanks to the inherently future-oriented nature of testing for genetic susceptib...

Concerns about the social sustainability of emerging technologies are identified as a motivation behind recent interest in public engagement as a mode of formal technology assessment, nanoscale science and technology (NST) being a key example. Two rival understandings of engagement as a contribution to social sustainability, namely ‘restoring trust...

The impacts of the activities of technological societies extend further into the future than their capacity to predict and control these impacts. Some have argued that the repercussions of this deficiency of knowledge cause fatal difficulties for both consequentialist and deontological accounts of future oriented obligations. Increasingly, internat...

Nanotechnologies are enabling technologies which rely on the manipulation of matter on the scale of billionths of a metre. It has been argued that scientific uncertainties surrounding nanotechnologies and the inability of regulatory agencies to keep up with industry developments mean that voluntary regulation will play a part in the development of...

This paper analyses the role which corporate social responsibility (CSR) currently plays in influencing the activities of companies involved in the nanotechnologies industry in the UK, and how CSR may contribute to building the material and social sustainability of the industry as part of a regime of adaptive and anticipatory governance. The paper...

In relation to a set of political responses to AGW, I argue that the values which motivate thinking about the future primarily in terms of risk calculation derive from deep-rooted social assumptions about the relationship between the present and the future, that these assumptions reflect a privilege accorded to certain forms of subjectivity, and th...

It is argued that the social significance of nanotechnologies should be understood in terms of the politics and ethics of uncertainty. This means that the uncertainties surrounding the present and future development of nanotechnologies should not be interpreted, first and foremost, in terms of concepts of risk. It is argued that risk, as a way of m...

As the number of intrinsically unknowable technologically produced risks global society faces continues to grow, it is evident that the question of our responsibilities towards future people is of urgent importance. However, the concepts with which this question is generally approached are, it is argued, deficient in comprehending the nature of the...

Traditional forms of the ethics of risk have dealt with the morality of knowable risks. Their goal has been to provide guidelines for judgement and action in order to minimise the likelihood of harm to individuals and maximise their opportunities to obtain benefits. Consequently, ethical approaches to risk have often taken utilitarian forms. The go...

Future Matters concerns contemporary approaches to the future – how the future is known, created and minded. In a social world whose pace continues to accelerate the future becomes an increasingly difficult terrain. While the focus of social life is narrowing down to the present, the futures we create on a daily basis cast ever longer shadows. Futu...