Description
When academics and policy makers achieved to include gender in energy research and policies, they mostly relied on traditional qualitative methods such as interviews and observations to gain insights into imagined futures. However, as important as these are to collect the voices of women and men to transform our current energy systems, they seem insufficient when it comes to uncovering the imagined worlds rather than solely isolated elements pre-determined by policy desires.In my PhD I used a storytelling method to place the voices and visions of women vendors at the center of the future of Mexico’s City public markets and their energy systems. Vendors were invited to collectively produce a fictional story of a market in 2050. The stories opened by detailing their imagined story world and the energy systems that powered it. Then they moved to events that could change those worlds and provided a description of who participated and how. Finally, the storytelling method closed with conversations about the created visions of the future.
I found that many stories envisioned off-grid and decentralized renewable energy systems that power commercial activities and activities such as care work. Also, I found the processes that vendor’s envisioned that could be used to discuss and accept energy projects in their markets. Finally, I found that this method invites people to speak freely, using their own terms and meanings.
During the session “Closing the gender gap in energy policies for a just transition”, I hope to present this method, examine the pros and cons of such an approach, as well as some of the results obtained by using it. With this, I hope that the futures storytelling method used could be employed to support energy transitions research and planning across local and regional scales.
| Period | 22 Jun 2022 |
|---|---|
| Event title | 3rd International Conference on Energy Research & Social Science: Energy and Climate Transformations |
| Event type | Conference |
| Conference number | 3 |
| Location | Manchester, United KingdomShow on map |
| Degree of Recognition | International |