Louise Reid

Theorizing the meso level: the household as a crucible of pro-environmental behaviour

This paper identifies the need to develop a conceptual approach that moves away from dichotomous thinking about pro-environmental behaviour by considering the meso level of reality, through which macro level change can be observed and micro level activity can be contextualized. The discussion reviews pro-environmental behaviour literatures, presenting an alternative conceptual approach that incorporates the importance of scale and the social units to which people belong. In particular, the paper argues that greater understanding of the household, as a unit within the meso level, offers an opportunity to rethink the future research agenda for the study of pro-environmental behaviour.

Low Carbon Housing: A ‘Green’ Wolf in Sheep's Clothing?

Ambitious carbon reduction targets are driving a new era of carbon control reflecting the UK, the EU and international commitment to mitigating the predicted impacts of global warming and climate change. Observed as a transition away from the more holistic goals of sustainable development (While et al., 2001), the ‘low carbon’ (LC) agenda is increasingly recognised as problematic in so far as it is pro-technological and promethean, marginalising the importance of social, political, economic and wider environmental issues. With specific implications for housing and householders, the paper explores how the current preoccupation with ‘LC’ presents some potential pitfalls in relation to advancing sustainable housing.

Environmental justice, capabilities, and the theorization of well-being

Environmental justice (EJ) scholarship is increasingly framing justice in terms of capabilities. This paper argues that capabilities are fundamentally about well-being and as such there is a need to more explicitly theorize well-being. We explore how capabilities have come to be influential in EJ and how well-being has been approached so far in EJ specifically and human geography more broadly. We then introduce a body of literature from social psychology which has grappled theoretically with questions about well-being, using the insights we gain from it to reflect on some possible trajectories and challenges for EJ as it engages with well-being.

Which ‘being’ in wellbeing? Ontology, wellness and the geographies of happiness:

This article examines current approaches to wellbeing research in the social sciences, reviewing their underlying ontologies to explore which ‘being’ is implied in contemporary research on wellbeing. It critically analyses themes from the ‘science of happiness’ for their focus on a decontextualized and individualized subject and highlights the emergence of an alternative, developing geographical research agenda in the study of wellbeing, termed here ‘intra-active wellbeing’. It is argued that this research agenda draws together formerly disparate aspects of geographical thought – classically humanistic wellbeing research and more-than-human inquiry – and creates space for a more pluralistic field of wellbeing scholarship.

Nudge(ography) and practice theories: Contemporary sites of behavioural science and post-structuralist approaches in geography?

Within geography there has been considerable debate about the reasons, patterns and consequences of human behaviour. Behavioural science, specifically Nudge, and practice theories are fashionable fields of enquiry, reflecting a long history of conversation between behavioural and poststructuralist approaches. The purpose of this paper is to foster further engagement with and between these perspectives, bringing to the fore the relevant ontologies from which they arise. The paper is thus largely concerned with the ‘ontological politics’ of approaches seeking to understand human action and concludes with some reflections on an agenda for geography, a discipline well placed to unite disparate concepts.

Integrated framework of home comfort: relaxation, companionship and control

ABSTRACT Home comfort is posited here as the state of relaxation and wellbeing that results from companionship and control to manage the home as desired. To date, studies of comfort have been dominated by building and natural scientists, laboratory settings and technical approaches, which understand comfort in physical, and primarily thermal, terms. Yet, the extensive research on the meaning and making of home by sociologists, human geographers, historians, anthropologists and philosophers highlights that there is much more to inhabitants’ expectations of the home than ensuring physiological ‘needs’ such as warmth. The home is imbued with emotional, social and cultural meaning, and is significant to individuals’ wellbeing in terms of it being (idealized as) a place of rest, family, continuity, control and security. For the first time, this paper brings together home and housing scholarship to conceptualize the findings of a qualitative study on the meanings of home comfort. In doing so, it offers a broad empirically and conceptually informed framework of home comfort and challenges the existing constrained notions and practices for the provision of comfort.

Spaces for Consumption: Pleasure and Placelessness in the Post-industrial City

Steven Miles, London, Sage, 2010, 209 pp., £22.99 (pbk), ISBN 9781412946667 A book that lucidly communicates complex sociological phenomena related to consumption and the contemporary urban environ...