A Solarpunk Ethnography: Methods and Approach
This is an ethnographic project that seeks to explore solarpunk as a phenomenon and a social movement. I will adopt a digital ethnographic approach, using data-gathering methods enabled by digital technologies and computer-mediated communication as its starting point. Online spaces are here seen as the ‘natural setting’ for solarpunk and will be the starting point for observation and conversation. The project draws on classic ethnographic methods that seek to engage and observe with people in their ‘natural environments’, allowing detailed, in-depth descriptions of everyday life and practice, whilst incorporating a range of methodological techniques, such as interviews and mapping. The project will seek emic perspectives and try to understand solarpunk from the ‘insider points of view’, allowing critical categories and meanings to emerge from the online encounter. Through the combination of these methods, the project aims to develop rich explanations of participants’ complex, situated lived experiences and beliefs of individuals within specific groups.
This project is a form of multi-sited ethnography that aims to engage with and trace social practices across the digital platforms through which they take place. While different social media platforms, online groups, and websites form distinct sites of study, solarpunk as a movement and social phenomena exists across all these sites. As a result of the development of contemporary social media, individuals’ online practices and discussions increasingly flow from platform to platform. Each online platform or site exhibits particular parameters, content, and norms, but given the movement of individuals across platforms, what takes place in one site can have an influence on others. Alternately, individuals may engage with different conversations and practices depending on what platform they are engaging with. Thus, tracing engagement across platforms is necessary – following the ‘thing’ (solarpunk) and the ‘people’ (solarpunks) – to gain a more holistic appreciation of solarpunk in the online sphere.
I will be utilising a similar methodological approach and specific methods to that used by Ruth Pearce (2016, 2018) and others (Murthy, 2008, Postill and Pink, 2012). This includes ‘lurking’ as an observer following particular social media users and topics of discussion in online spaces; engaging more actively as participant in online groups and discussions; textual and thematic analysis of public discussions, blogs, and articles; tracing interactions across platforms; interviewing individual solarpunks; experimenting with various online and offline solarpunk practices, and reflecting on my own experiences in my fieldwork diary to inform analysis. These methods seek to engage beyond just interviews through sharing materials, communication, and activities of different forms in order to gain ethnographic insight into the emic perspectives of solarpunks that participate in online spaces.
Researcher positionality
The design and focus of this research have been informed by my personal experience within the online solarpunk field. I became aware of solarpunk sometime around 2015, and I have been reading solarpunk stories and engaging with different online solarpunk spaces since then. There is strong resonance between the perspectives put forward by solarpunk and my own worldview. I have found solace and inspiration in many solarpunk stories and online discussions of the relationship between solarpunk principles and proposed responses to contemporary social and environmental issues. I also incorporate a range of arguably solarpunk practices into my everyday life. Given this extended involvement with solarpunk my positionality can be understood as a blend of insider-participant and outside-researcher.
Aims
This project is an ethnographic exploration of solarpunk as an emerging phenomena and movement working within localised and global spheres. A key element of the study will be to investigate how discussions of current issues, as well as potential solutions, are informed by solarpunk imagined futures, and how networks of solarpunks and other aligned activists share stories of existing prefigurative and disruptive projects that may in turn feed into these positive visions.
Of particular interest is the ways that imagined futures and practical projects interact with one another to shape localised responses to communal issues as well as global movements calling for structural change. To date, no comprehensive study has been conducted of solarpunk as a movement. This project aims to redress this and to advance insights into how solarpunk represents a distinct phenomenon of the Anthropocene.
Research questions:
1. How do people engage with the various spaces and elements of solarpunk?
2. How does solarpunk manifest as a social movement, as protest, and as (everyday) practice? How is this grounded in different contexts?
3. How do imagined solarpunk future(s) shape the practices of individuals and communities who engage with them?
Outcomes and Significance
A key objective of the project is to write an ethnography of the solarpunk movement (my PhD thesis), which will be a deep investigation of the movement as a socio-cultural phenomenon. Key findings of interest will also be presented in both academic and non-academic publications in order to make the information available to a wide variety of audiences that might find it useful and/or interesting.
Plain language reporting of key findings will be provided on the project website and Tumblr blog as the research progresses. The project website and blog will also provide links to any published academic papers reporting on the research findings.
Investigation of these issues has the potential not only to add to academic knowledge about emerging social movements in the Anthropocene, but may also be useful for members of these movements themselves and progressive policy developers. It is always useful to balance the important analysis of disadvantage and deterioration with analysis of projects and movements attempting to bring about positive change.
This project is particularly timely and worthwhile in the current context of rapidly increasing climate destabilisation, rising inequality and social unrest in many areas around the globe, and lack of meaningful government action on environmental and social issues. Many common perspectives on likely (near and long-term) futures either try and avoid thinking about these problems or are pessimistic about the catastrophic trajectory the status quo has us on. Solarpunk is one of few notable examples of clear eyed engagement with current and expected problems while daring to explicitly imagine and work towards more hopeful futures.
