The Oxford Handbook of Energy and Society

The Oxford Handbook of Energy and Society presents an overview of this expanding area that has evolved dramatically over the past decade, away from one largely dominated by structural, political economic treatments on the one hand, and social-psychological studies of individual-level attitudes and behaviors on the other, toward a far more conceptually and methodologically rich and exciting field that brings in, for example, social practices, system complexity, risk theory, social studies of science, and social movements theories. This volume seeks to capture the variety of scales and methods, and range of both conceptual and empirical analyses that define the field, while drawing particular attention to indigenous peoples, poverty, political power, communities and cities. Organized into seven sections, chapters cover social theory and energy-society relations, political-economic perspectives, consumption dynamics, energy equity and energy poverty, energy and publics, energy and governance, as well as emerging trends.

Debra J. Davidson is Professor of Environmental Sociology in the Department of Resource Economics and Environmental Sociology at the University of Alberta, Canada. Her primary areas of teaching and research include the social dimensions of energy food systems, with special interest in the impacts on, and the observed and potential institutional transformation in, energy and food systems due to climate change. She is co-author of Challenging Legitimacy at the Precipice of Energy Calamity, with Mike Gismondi (2011), and co-editor of Consuming Sustainability: Critical Perspectives on Socio-ecological Change, with Kirstin Hatt (2005).

Matthias Gross is Professor of Environmental Sociology at Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research-UFZ in Leipzig, Germany, and by joint appointment, the University of Jena, Germany. His recent research focuses on the changing role of civil society, alternative energy systems, the sociology of engineering, real world experiments, ecological design, renewable energy systems, risk and ignorance, and theories of the knowledge society. He is a founding editor of the journal Nature + Culture. Book publications in English include Ignorance and Surprise: Science, Society, and Ecological Design (2010), Renewable Energies (2014, with Rüdiger Mautz), the Routledge International Handbook of Ignorance Studies (edited with Linsey McGoey, 2015), and Green European: Environmental Behaviour and Attitudes in Europe in a Historical and Cross-Cultural Comparative Perspective (2017, co-editor with Audrone Telesiene).