PhD Researcher, School of Development and Society, Norwegian University of Life Sciences (NMBU)
Biography
Grant is an artist, landscape architect and academic within the school of Society Development and Planning at NMBU in Norway. Originally from Glasgow, Scotland, he is interested in the ways by which technology influences culture and is undertaking interdisciplinary Doctoral research combining critical perspectives and methods from Political Ecology with interpretative and reflexive ethnographic methodologies from energy social sciences. By applying them to groups of actors participating in the design and delivery of renewable energy infrastructure, he seeks to understand how the contestation of landscape designations and the operationalisation of professional values within the planning system relates to the wider justice outcomes of energy transitions. This includes critical discourse analysis of public enquiries into wind energy developments in Dumfries and Galloway from 2014-2024, document analysis, and visual analysis of maps, diagrams and 3Dvisualisations, as well as participant observation and semi-structured interviews. Among the concepts and theories used to approach this data are ecological ethics, energy ethics, energy justice, environmental justice, landscape democracy, extractivism, as well as the actor-focused development sociology of Norman Long and Foucault’s theories of discourse and power. It is hoped the results of this study will present an applied understanding of how the ethical dimensions of energy policy related to climate change and biodiversity loss compete with national strategic aims, regional and local actors at the moment of delivery of energy transitions, and are expressed in the landscape.
