Visit of Professor Elizabeth Shove to University of Amsterdam

On 27 June, the Sarphati Ethnography team welcomed Professor Elizabeth Shove to the University of Amsterdam. Elizabeth Shove is Emeritus Distinguished Professor of Sociology at Lancaster University and a Fellow of the British Academy. Her extensive work on social theories of practice and health has long inspired our team’s approach to studying everyday practices. With support from MetaHealth and the University of Amsterdam's Research Priority Area - Personal Microbiome Health (RPA-PMH), we invited Professor Shove to give two talks.

The first presentation took place in the morning in our Department of Sociology, as part of the monthly Fenomenalia seminar series. In her lecture titled Flexibility, practice theory and energy demand, she drew on insights from the ‘DEMAND Centre - Dynamics of Energy, Mobility and Demand’ (2013-2019), where she served as principal investigator. Addressing current debates around how energy demand can be better timed and made more ‘flexible’, she used Social Practice Theory to show how everyday routines are shaped by shared temporal rhythms – and how these, in turn, influence when and how we use energy. From mealtimes and working hours to industrial schedules and hospital routines, her examples illustrated infrastructures, institutions and social practices are deeply intertwined with time. By shifting attention from individual behaviours to collective temporal patterns, Elizabeth invited us to rethink what ‘flexibility’ in energy use really means – and how it might be redefined in line with the rhythms of social life.

After lunch, Elizabeth gave a second talk as part of the monthly Microbiome Friday Seminar series, organized by RPA-PMH, at the Institute for Advanced Studies. In her lecture, titled Practice theory and the biosocial - microbes, matter and milieu, Elizabeth explored how social practice theory can offer a distinctive perspective on the relationships between microbes and the social world – not by focusing on individuals or microbes in isolation, but on the practices that connect them. Taking the concept of ‘biosocial’ as a starting point, she used examples including water, the plague, antimicrobial resistance and air pollution to illustrate the complexity of humans-microbe interactions and entanglements. Her talk highlighted what becomes visible when we treat practices – not people or microbes – as the basic unit of social analysis.

The Sarphati Ethnography team would like to warmly thank Elizabeth Shove for visiting the University of Amsterdam and for her insightful lectures!