The power of stories

Rebecca Ford is a postgraduate research student and teaching assistant with the University of the Highlands and Islands (UHI), based at the Institute for Northern Studies in Orkney, and a director on the board of the Orkney Renewable Energy Forum (OREF). Her research is informed by the work of Mikhail Bakhtin and her experience of community, growing up and living in Orkney. In her PhD project, ‘Words and Waves: A Dialogical Approach to Discourse, Community, and Marine Renewable Energy in Orkney’, she develops ecological dialogism – an approach to language and meaning-making as an embodied process enacted within a physi- cal and cultural environment – to understand the role of narrative and the process of com- munity in the development of Marine Renewable Energy in Orkney. In 2014 Rebecca worked as a Research Assistant for the Alien Energy project at the IT University of Copenhagen, carrying out fieldwork at the European Marine Energy Centre (EMEC) in Orkney.

Lea Schick is a researcher investigating innovation for sustainable futures at the intersection of art, design and infrastructure studies. Lea is studying smart grids and how ‘consumers’ are imagined to become more active and involved in their own energy consumption through home displays and economic incentives. Engaging with disciplines such as art, design and architecture she is proposing more social and creative ways of engaging citizens in energy and sustainability. She teaches sustainable IT and management at the IT University of Copenhagen, and works as an innovation specialist at the Alexandra Institute, where she is working with sustainable transitions in SMEs.