Staff profile

As an anthropologist, I view energy provisioning as fundamental to all human activity. My research centres people within energy systems to understand how changes in practice emerge through the interplay of culture, infrastructure, and policy. I examine how energetic substances, technologies, and the processes that connect them come to matter in people's lives and in wider political and economic projects.

I have conducted ethnographic research in Wales, England, and São Tomé and Príncipe, engaging with communities, industries, policymakers, and energy practitioners as they navigate questions of development, transition, and everyday provisioning. My work continues to return to energy as more than a technical issue: I am interested in the social, material, and political conditions through which energy futures become imaginable, desirable, or necessary.

My first monograph, Living Off-Grid in Wales, examined how people create and sustain alternative energy systems beyond the conventional grid. The book explored the everyday practicalities of off-grid living while contributing to wider debates about sustainability, infrastructure, and the diversity of energy futures.

My forthcoming monograph, Hydrogen in Plain Sight: Towards an Ethnography of an Element, explores hydrogen as both a chemical substance and a social proposition. While hydrogen chemistry is stable, its social life is continually reshaped as it becomes attached to different visions of industrial renewal, climate action, energy futures, and economic opportunity.

My work on energy in society forms part of a deeper interest in how problem framing shapes collective decisions about possible futures. I am interested in the social, material, and political processes through which particular conditions are framed as requiring intervention, and how solutions help to produce particular understandings of the problems they address.

Alongside my academic research, I work closely with policymakers, practitioners, and communities to develop a problem-finding approach to questions of energy transition, regional development, and climate policy. I am interested in producing scholarship that is theoretically ambitious while remaining grounded in the everyday realities of people living through technological, environmental, and industrial change.

Research interests: Societies in flux, material pathways, energy systems and grids, problem framing, and science in society.

Authored book

• Using Hydrogen as an Energy Accessibility Solution for Sustainable Development in Africa
  
  Forde, E., Mkaratigwa, E., & Barron, A. R. (2023). Using Hydrogen as an Energy Accessibility Solution for Sustainable Development in Africa. lulu.com.
• Living Off-Grid in Wales: Eco-Villages in Policy and Practice
  
  Forde, E. (2020). Living Off-Grid in Wales: Eco-Villages in Policy and Practice. University of Wales Press.

Chapter in book

• One Wales, one model? Complicating ways of knowing Wales
  
  Forde, E. (2021). One Wales, one model? Complicating ways of knowing Wales. In W. J. Morgan & F. Bowie (Eds.), Social Anthropologies of the Welsh: Past and Present (pp. 200-219). Sean Kingston Publishing.
• From cultures of resistance to the new social movements: DIY self- build in West Wales
  
  Forde, E. (2017). From cultures of resistance to the new social movements: DIY self- build in West Wales. In M. Benson & I. Hamiduddin (Eds.), Self-Build Homes: Social Discourse, Experience and Directions. UCL Press. https://doi.org/10.14324/111.9781911576877

Journal Article

• The Hydrogen Bike: Communicating the Production and Safety of Green Hydrogen
  
  Glover, K., Rudd, J. A., Jones, D. R., Forde, E., Warwick, M. E. A., Gannon, W. J. F., & Dunnill, C. W. (2021). The Hydrogen Bike: Communicating the Production and Safety of Green Hydrogen. Frontiers in Communication, 5. https://doi.org/10.3389/fcomm.2020.540635
• The ethics of energy provisioning: Living off-grid in rural Wales
  
  Forde, E. (2017). The ethics of energy provisioning: Living off-grid in rural Wales. Energy Research & Social Science, 30, 82-93. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.erss.2017.06.018
• Planning as a form of enclosure
  
  Forde, E. (2015). Planning as a form of enclosure. Focaal, 2015(72), 81-94. https://doi.org/10.3167/fcl.2015.720107