Developing an Intersectional Approach to Emerging Energy Technologies in Homes

What would an energy transition research agenda embracing intersectionality, equality and equity look like?

Tom Hargreaves and Nickhil Sharma (University of East Anglia) comment on contributions of the Buildings & Cities special issue Energy, Emerging Technology and Gender in Homes on the role of gender in technology development and the energy transition. This must be broadened further to social justice issues. A failure to do so risks fuelling resistance and pushback to new and emerging energy technologies. Three key avenues for future research and practices for a just energy transition and emerging technologies are set out.

The 11 contributions to the Special Issue are rich and varied. Whilst there is a bias towards the Global North (particularly Europe and Australasia – although Schiffer et al.’s (2022) focus on energy access in the Global South is a valuable exception here), they examine a range of different emerging energy technologies. These span from smart home technologies (Aagaard & Madsen 2022; Aggeli et al. 2022; Chambers 2022) and household retrofits (Bartiaux 2022) to energy feedback, domestic microgeneration (Lucas-Healey et al., 2022; Martin 2022; Shirani et al. 2022) and home batteries (Pink 2022). One of the key strengths of the issue - across all the contributions - is the use of qualitative, often ethnographic, methods to generate detailed insights into the connections between the micro-scale complexities of everyday domestic life and macro-scale concerns around just and sustainable energy transitions. In this way, the issue highlights how gender-related concerns and implications emerge in and through:

• the persistent gender imbalance in the male-dominated energy and technology professions (e.g. Aagaard & Madsen 2022)
• the gendered imaginaries adopted and enacted by these professionals and how they shape design processes (e.g. Shirani et al. 2022)
• the marketing and diffusion of energy technologies along often stereotypically gendered lines (e.g. Chambers 2022)
• the adoption and use of energy technologies and how new forms of digital and energy housekeeping shape the gendered division of labour inside homes (e.g. Aggeli et al. 2022; Martin 2022)
• perhaps most importantly, how these unequal gender dynamics not only shape the design, development, diffusion and use of these technologies, but are also shaped by them such that the technologies themselves inform and shape the gender identities, roles and relations of the future (e.g. Mechlenborg & Gram-Hanssen 2022; Pink 2022; Strengers, Dahlgren et al. 2022)

The Special Issue therefore makes significant progress on a critically important topic, providing strong evidence for the need to take gender much more seriously in technology development and energy transitions than has hitherto been the case. Nonetheless, this focus on gender needs to be the start rather than the end-point in efforts to foreground social justice concerns in relation to emerging domestic energy technologies. As the Editors of the Special Issue themselves recognise (Strengers, Gram-Hanssen et al. 2022), there remains an important need for future work that explores more diverse forms of household configuration in more diverse contexts, and that not only draws attention to further axes of inequality - such as around race, sexuality, age, or disability – but does so in an intersectional way that explores how these inequalities compound and co-produce one another (Crenshaw 1989). In the rest of this commentary, we point to some key ways in which this intersectional agenda might be further developed.

Intersectionality as a critical approach to emerging energy technologies

The way I try to understand the interconnection of all forms of subordination is through a method I call ‘ask the other question’. When I see something that looks racist, I ask ‘Where is the patriarchy in this?’ When I see something that looks sexist, I ask, ‘Where is the heterosexism in this?’ When I see something that looks homophobic, I ask, ‘Where are the class interests in this?  (Matsuda 1990, p. 1189)

Intersectionality was first coined by Kimberlé Crenshaw and used to describe the various ways in which the struggles of Black women fell through the cracks of both feminist and anti-racist discourse (Crenshaw 1989; Davis 2008). Crenshaw argued that social justice analyses must grapple with the inequalities created by gender and race interacting together to uniquely shape Black women’s experiences. Intersectionality illustrates how multiple systems of oppression compound to create unbalanced power dynamics, often co-producing each other. Since its inception, intersectionality has been developed as both theory and praxis and has been appropriated by various disciplines to enable thinking about contingency and connectedness in social and political phenomena.

Intersectionality brings in two unique yet crucial perspectives which can enrich discourses on energy justice (Jenkins 2018):

• intersectionality’s radical core is most concerned with examining power – where it is situated and how it functions, how it transforms over space and time, and how it shapes individuals and is shaped by them (Overstreet et al. 2020). This focus on power draws attention to the hidden agendas and unintended consequences of new technologies, thereby making intersectionality crucial in efforts to redistribute for social justice
• current discourses on energy futures routinely abstract consumers to general, universal, unspecified and undifferentiated figures such as Strengers’ (2014) ‘Resource Man’. This reductive approach often serves to justify the deployment of one-size-fits all visions and policies that support them.

In contrast, intersectional approaches can offer an antidote to such universalist visions, paving the way for industry, academia, civil society, and government organisations to grapple with the many complexities and contradictions in the lives of diverse energy citizens.

Drawing on a variety of emerging energy technologies and infrastructures in homes, this Special Issue highlights how energy consumers are typically imagined as performing their household routines and practices in ways that are traditionally masculine. It thus raises important concerns around the implications of these technologies for those that do not comply with this dominant imaginary. As the Special Issue amply demonstrates, it is important to acknowledge the ongoing and emergent ways in which energy technologies proliferate in diverse household settings where the consumers aren’t necessarily technophilic, able-bodied men. But, while the focus of this issue is on gender, it is also important to emphasise that energy industry imaginaries still routinely disregard other social categories such as race, ability, sexual orientation, etc., which are as crucial as gender in realising just and sustainable energy futures. Therefore, we argue as suggested by Matsuda (1990), the next logical step to build on the findings of this Special Issue is to ‘ask the other question’.

Another reason why the findings of this Special Issue must be expanded to include the relationship between gender and other social categories is because doing so can help better understand the diversity of energy consumers, their practices, and their ever-changing contexts. Intersectionality-focused research could help understand the myriad ways in which different household types, in different socioeconomic contexts, and across geographies engage with energy technologies. It would recognise that meanings and performances of gender or of home can differ across different ethnic groups or races, for example. Understanding the intersections of different social categories in this way could bring several society-wide benefits. For example, such research could enrich the data collection practices of smart energy technologies so that the data they gather could not only help achieve energy efficiency targets but also make care and welfare for different types of households more just while also providing crucial insights into vulnerability.

A notable early example of where such an approach is being trialled is in the case of UK Power networks in the East and Southeast of England. Recognising the challenges of identifying and supporting the most vulnerable consumers in this region of the UK, especially in the context of the current energy crisis, they have acknowledged the necessity to better understand people’s circumstances, and particularly how social categories such as race, gender, class interact with personal factors such as health-related or financial issues – to create more complex situations of vulnerability. In response they are seeking to create a new vulnerability dataset that will seek to shine a light on how intersecting vulnerabilities shape people’s energy use and how this data can contribute towards more inclusive energy transitions (Stone 2022).

Reflecting on the broader literature relating to critiques of emerging technologies, particularly digital technologies in relation to energy futures, we argue that scholarship so far has tended to focus on gender and income whereas perspectives on race, migration status/nationality, disability, queerness, etc. remain relatively rare and on the margins. Furthermore, only a few critiques have engaged directly with social justice and these have tended to be ‘auxiliary’ (Krivý 2018) in nature – that is, they have tended to focus on the symptoms of injustice such as how specific user groups are variously included or excluded by new technologies, without necessarily confronting their underlying causes which lie in the historic institutionalisation and ongoing normalisation of different systems of oppression. To generate just, liveable futures we need research that actively resists and challenges the root causes of the inequalities linked to the neoliberal, technosolutionist logics of some energy industry visions. We argue that intersectionality can offer this transformative perspective and place radical social justice at the heart of future energy visions. 

Bringing an intersectional approach into future research

This Special Issue has helped in critically deconstructing sociotechnical imaginaries, challenging techno-determinist visions, and highlighting that paternalistic agendas with universalist visions are not a salvation for energy consumers, able to solve complex global problems such as energy access and equity. It has already begun to engage with decolonial, feminist agendas and called for unsettling power relations perpetuating the proliferation of digital energy futures (e.g. Pink 2022; Schiffer et al. 2022). It has highlighted how the application of gender equality in energy narratives can influence not only technology design and development but also how funding and donations flow towards vulnerable world regions (Schiffer et al. 2022). These are hugely important contributions but efforts to develop inclusive and just energy transitions must necessarily extend beyond gender. To conclude this commentary, we briefly highlight three key avenues for future research that can usefully build on the context-rich insights of this Special Issue.

First, there is a need to start relentlessly ‘asking the other question’ (Matsuda 1990) in future research on energy and emerging technologies in homes or elsewhere. Engaging with intersectional critiques on emerging domestic energy technologies will demand the development of more ‘multi-focal’ approaches that actively combine queer, decolonial, feminist, and anti-racist critiques. This is crucial because these different critiques expose different injustices such as privatisation, extractivism, exploitation, commodification, stereotyping, omissions etc. A combination of their insights can make demands for justice stronger and more comprehensive. Remedies to address one dimension of injustice in energy transitions must extend to others, and solutions offered by one critical perspective must inform others too (Rosol & Blue 2022). There is thus a need to bring these perspectives into conversation with one another, reflecting on their commonalities, strengths, and insights.

Second, it is vital that future work goes beyond a downstream focus on injustice among users, to focus as well on the upstream processes of institutionalisation that enable and normalise ongoing inequalities. This will demand acknowledging historical processes of technology and infrastructure development, how they have generated forms of injustice, and how these are being addressed, confronted or resisted in the development of new technologies. It will also demand research that goes beyond the home and the day-to-day practices of technology users, to explore how different inequalities continue to be institutionalised (or challenged) in the day-to-day practices of technology professionals.

Third, and finally, there is also an important place for more forward-looking work that seeks to draw attention to and redress ongoing inequalities through novel design practice. Beyond simply developing more human-centred technologies that cater to the needs of a more diverse range of users, future research and design practice should seek to follow the principles of design justice (Costanza-Chock 2020) wherein marginalized groups lead design processes in ways that actively and explicitly confront the structural inequalities they routinely experience. There is also scope for more experimental forms of proactive or speculative design (e.g. Auger 2013) that do not simply echo techno-solutionist logics by neatly addressing inequalities through more inclusive design solutions, but that proactively problematise currently normalised situations by drawing attention to the often hidden forms of inequality they rest upon. For example, emerging domestic technologies such as digital voice assistants or smart phone apps could be designed to actively draw attention to unsafe labour practices and conditions in global supply chains, they could provide explicit notifications to users about the discriminatory impacts of algorithms on particular groups (e.g. Benjamin 2019; Eubanks 2018), or they could raise questions about unequal gender relations in everyday household practices. In such ways they could help to inspire new questions and subject positions among householders that create new connections between domestic environments and wider inequalities in efforts to envision and bring about more just and sustainable futures.

References

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