Making Sense of the Scottish Community Energy Sector – An Organising Typology

The community energy sector is widely understood to be a pluralistic sector, encompassing a broad range of aims, motivations, and practices. This heterogeneity is, however, still not very well understood. Dominant analytical frameworks in the study of energy geographies offer little in the way of exploring the diversity of motivations, visions, and social relations that are present within the community energy sector, nor their causes or consequences. Drawing on the notion of ‘critical pluralism’, this paper aims to highlight the diverse range of sociotechnical configurations that make up this sector in Scotland, and begins to discuss some potential causes and consequences. To do so, it presents a novel community energy typology, based on an analysis of technical and social dimensions of 367 projects in Scotland. This shows that whilst the Scottish community energy sector contains a broad range of motivations, technologies, and social practices, the sector has become dominated by groups for whom energy generation is a means to achieve local socio-economic development. The paper discusses the community-level and policy drivers that may have contributed to this. It also discusses how we can begin to understand a diverse sector’s ability to affect the wider structures in which it operates.     

Nation-building and Canada's national symbolic order, 1993–2015

This article examines the symbolic construction of Canadian national identity by the 1993–2006 Liberal governments and the 2006–2015 Conservative governments. To do so, it employs the concept of a ‘national symbolic order’, which refers to the complex set of public symbols that invoke, transport, and define claims to a shared national identity. Within Canada's national symbolic order, we focus on the state's use of national symbols across two domains: Speeches from the Throne and banknotes. Our analysis shows that Canada's recent Conservative government has used both of these domains to reshape Canadian national identity in ways that accord with neo-conservative values and ideology, and that it has done so in a coherent, consistent, and comprehensive fashion. This analysis highlights the symbolic strategies employed by state actors in linking particular ideologies to their nation-building projects; these strategies span multiple political and policy spaces.     

‘A matter of commonsense’: the Coventry poliomyelitis epidemic 1957 and the British public

In 1956, the British Ministry of Health instituted a vaccination programme against poliomyelitis, but run into myriad supply and administrative issues. When Coventry experienced an epidemic in 1957, it came to symbolise these problems. Throughout, it was claimed that the government lacked ‘common sense’. This article explores how and why ‘common sense’ was used as a rhetorical weapon in the debates over policy at the local and national level. While those claiming ‘common sense’ were often at odds with medical and administrative authorities, the arguments were often informed by deeply held beliefs about vaccination and disease.     

The Britishness of ‘British Video Games’

Abstract

British Government policy has much to say about video games, through production support, regulation and recognition (or lack of it) of their cultural nature, with games defined and promoted as part of the creative industries in a manner which owes much to film policy. Yet, the drive to promote both the games industry and games culture, and the inconsistent usage of terms like culture and creativity, produces tensions between different elements of ‘Britishness’, expressed and experienced not only through policy, but also through the creation and consumption of games. In considering the specificity of games’ contribution to British identity, therefore, we must understand how different elements of cultural policy interact with the interests of audiences and creators to define ‘British games’ – games which have the quality of being, or being seen to be, British. Such games might be expected not only to represent British culture within a global marketplace, and to project soft power, but also to address the British nation in some manner. This diversity, of global and local, of present-mindedness and nostalgia, suggests that British games articulate a complex and plural sense of national (cultural) identity.