Suchergebnisse

This thesis provides an exploratory account of the ways in which the installation of domestic central heating systems can shape the energy they consume. Space heating is the single most significant contributor to domestic energy consumption in the UK. Despite evidence to suggest that the installer and installation process are influential in shaping this, these have been subject to very little enquiry to date. Instead, attempts to reduce the energy consumed through central heating systems have sought to improve the technical efficiency of the system components, or assumed an economic rationale to encourage end users to operate their heating in more efficient ways. Thus far, these approaches have not yielded the energy reductions necessary to meet the UK government's 2050 targets to reduce carbon emissions by 80%, on 1990 levels. Given the extremely limited research into central heating installation, or with installers, a highly qualitative, flexible and culturally sensitive method is required to explore these. Consequently, this investigation has adopted an ethnographic approach, including interviewing heating engineers, shadowing them in domestic properties, observing manufacturer training sessions, and spending time in plumbers' merchants, to reveal several distinct aspects of installation that can shape the energy subsequently consumed through central heating systems. These include heating engineers' shared identities, learning and membership within a community of practice; their relationships with plumbers' merchants and sales representatives; the materials and technologies involved in the installation process; and engineers' experiences and assumptions of end users. Evidently, there are multiple ways in which the installer and installation process can have a significant role in shaping the energy consumed through domestic central heating systems. If we are to achieve energy savings in the built environment, it is vital that academics and policy makers more fully consider these intermediary actors and processes.

The democratic changes taking place in South Africa in 1994 merged providentially with international human rights concerns. One could even argue that South Africa epitomised the post cold war to 9/11 period in which former authoritarian regimes turned willingly towards a democratic and market oriented, liberal democracy. In this new tide of respect for human rights, and as actually embodying the evil of the past, the South African Police was faced with the explicit demand to take on and put into practice the principles of human rights based policing. In line with the overall Zeitgeist, human rights were seen as key to bringing about post-apartheid legitimacy for state institutions. It compelled some far reaching administrative and institutional changes. How then did human rights translate into local police practice, and specifically into the daily practice of detectives at two police stations in Johannesburg? This thesis is an exploration of this question. The translation of human rights into daily practice was, as this thesis shows, is far from straightforward. At the interface between police, the law and people a spectrum of human rights vernaculars emerged. These vernaculars gave new meaning to human rights. They revealed that the dominant legalistic language and practice of human rights, which claims universality and non-particularity, is highly specific and exclusive. This, instead of blaming it on their unwillingness, explains why police officer fail to do justice to human rights policing. These vernaculars also made police practice workable and the state legible to those directly affected. Through this, new social manoeuvres and new practices of local justice were produced. For example these vernaculars recovered for the police officers a position from which to use their own moral discretion which human rights as juridical technical procedure deprive them of. Further it allows the population to appropriate state power and redirect into the realm of informality where as heavy handed persuasion and tangible punishment it serves forms of local justice. In this thesis I show that all these social manoeuvres become visible if one puts on analytical par the hyper-reality of human rights (and its policy consensus) with the tactical and tacit practices of everyday life both of people and police. It allows us to see how the contemporaneous present takes shape beyond a suffocating exclusive dichotomy which posits an either/or choice between the realisation of a teleological normative future or the continuation of the past. I conclude that human rights do not necessarily produce legitimacy, nor are they in total opposition to state violence, and in fact they often become the means through which state violence is reproduced, appropriated and re-directed.

The village of Winterfeld in the former German Democratic Republic experienced two encounters with refugees: after WWII with Germans driven from their homes farther east, & again in 1990 with Jews from the Soviet Union. Interviews with over 100 of these refugees reveal the psychological & social reaction of the villagers who had to deal with the feelings of insecurity induced by decades of surveillance & control & their deep seeded traditional fears of strangers & witches. This type of research raises important methodological questions. Adapted from the source document.