Graduate Student, Earth and Environment
PhD Student
Thesis Title: Practice, identity, power and discourse in users' accounts of sustainable technologies: perspectives from a village in India
About
My PhD research focuses on the intended users’ experiences of a sustainable technology through empirical investigation of a solar powered drinking water technology in a village in India. The overall question for my research is – how do users of a sustainable technology experience and interpret it? My case study is a solar-powered reverse osmosis plant in a village called Kotri in Rajasthan. I am examining the accounts of its users as well as non-users. I focus on how the users actively interpret such technologies, and give it their own meanings during its use. My research is also informed by feminist approach that highlights that users cannot be considered as a homogenous group; and that diverse users may even construct radically different meanings for the same technology. In my case study, I am paying particular attention to gender, age and caste – as the key social differences.
Examining the everyday use of the technology, I seek to develop an understanding of the material as well as symbolic meanings of the social practices related to drinking water collection and use. I am examining how users’ behaviour related to the use of technology is shaped by their habits, expectations and collective norms. In attempting to understand users’ behaviour, I am examining how users’ expectations of the technology are shaped within larger discourses of development; and also, how the users’ identities are also constructed within these discourses. Hence, I am examining the discursive context within which users as well as their experiences of technology are constructed. The use (or non use) of the technology as the performing of certain practices in this context is also an act through which users construct their own identities while drawing on these discourses. I attempt to understand how they do it, while paying particular attention to the ways in which power relations are embedded within material as well as discursive practices.
Prior to starting the PhD, I worked as a Research Associate at Loughborough University in the U.K. where I conducted research on stakeholder engagement and related social issues in sustainability assessment of urban development projects. I hold a MSc in Sustainability, Planning and Environmental Policy from Cardiff University in the U.K. and a Bachelor of Planning degree from School of Planning and Architecture in New Delhi, India. I have also worked for two years in India that included contribution to the preparation of a regional plan and a study of ecological changes.
I have a strong interest in sociological investigations of sustainable development issues, particularly those related to users' interpretations of technology, equity, gender, power relations, practices and discourses.
