You are viewing:
Browse results
-
‘As snug as a bug in a rug’: post-war housing, homes and coal fires
This article examines the image of the open coal fire in redefining the home in post-war Britain. Rather than a timeless source of reverie and comfort, the post-war fire articulated values that were central to the nation in this period of reconstruction.
-
Collecting the personal: stories of domestic energy and everyday life at the National Museum of Scotland
The Energise gallery at the National Museum of Scotland explores the sources, generation, distribution and use of energy and questions how science and technology transform how we power our lives. This article details three objects around which a focus on personal stories was adopted.
-
Energy/Culture: a reading guide for historical literature
This reading guide maps the existing literature on energy history by focusing on changes in the scholarly understandings of the relationship between energy and culture. It aims to provide an entry point for thinking about energy’s past, present and future.
-
Getting to grips with energy: fuel, materiality and daily life
Editorial
-
Light as material/lighting as practice: urban lighting and energy
This article uses case-studies of public realm lighting design to argue that deciphering energy consumption requires equal attention to both the material properties of light and the interlinked practices through which social spaces come to be lit.
-
Making Material and Cultural Connections: the fluid meaning of ‘Living Electrically’ in Japan and Canada 1920–1960
This article explores how the process of aligning material and cultural ‘connections’ was crucial to defining different historical trajectories of domestic electrification in Canada and Japan. Detailing how connections were made and modified reveals the divergent and fluid meaning of living electrically across space and time.
-
Networks of knowledge and power: working collaboratively on the HoNESt project
This article outlines some of the considerations, challenges, conflicts and opportunities offered by undertaking research as part of a pan-European and interdisciplinary research project. New working methods and considerations led to new conclusions on the History of Nuclear Energy and Society (HoNESt) project.
-
Refrigerating India
Grounded in ethnographic research in India, this article examines the powerful change potential embedded in the refrigerator. It examines how the refrigerator’s time saving and food preserving potentials are eroding deeply anchored ideas about diet and health in India.
-
The language of Electricity: Jan Hicks in conversation with Bill Morrison
This in-conversation piece reveals the nature, rationale and context of the recent collaboration between film artist Bill Morrison and the Museum of Science and Industry for the exhibition Electricity: The spark of life. The development of Morrison’s art installation, Electricity, had an impact on the thinking processes and practices of both artist and curator, producing new shared interpretations of electrical energy and power.
-
‘The whole exhibition becomes the stage…’ – a journey through time by children for children as a new approach to peer learning
This paper presents an account of a project that the Museum of Electricity and Life implemented to provide educationally disadvantaged children with opportunities to participate in cultural life and help them to develop new competences. The children accompanied their peer group as travel guides through the history of electricity. In the process they slipped into different roles and imparted their knowledge through short theatrical performances.