The ‘right to energy’: To what exactly?
Professor Gordon Walker (Lancaster Environment Centre, Lancaster University) will be paying a visit to the University of Manchester on Wednesday 11th February 2015 in an event sponsored by the Geography discipline at SEED and CURE. Prof. Walker will be asking us to consider what it means to conceive of a right to energy, and how in doing so, it is necessary to consider what energy is for. His talk will posit that right based talk has increasingly incorporated energy into a set of ‘second generation’ rights that seek to demand the politically significant socio-economic or welfare demands of contemporary global citizenship. Energy is more than just another commodity, and the state and other actors involved in energy provisioning therefore have obligations that go beyond the normal (uneven) market relations. Professor Walker states that is a specific matter of justice. Prof. Walker’s talk will draw on his work with the RCUK funded DEMAND (Dynamics of Energy, Mobility and Demand) Centre based at the University of Lancaster of which he is Co-Director.
The seminar will take place on Wednesday 11th February at 4pm in the Humanities Bridgeford Street Building (HBS) in Room 1.69/1.70.
Professor Gordon Walker is based in the Lancaster Environment Centre/Geography at Lancaster University. Previous work has included environmental justice theory, concepts and methods; sustainability, social practice and transitions; energy vulnerability and thermal comfort as well as a range of other work on the social, spatial and normative dimensions of the environment, sustainability and risk issues.
Personal Profile: http://www.lancaster.ac.uk/lec/about-us/people/gordon-walker
DEMAND Centre: http://www.demand.ac.uk/
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