Dr Bryony Parrish

Bryony is a qualitative researcher working on households’ adoption and use of new technologies, and the implications for users’ wellbeing, meeting policy objectives, and environmental sustainability. 

Her current work focuses on:

• How households learn about new technologies, particularly heat pumps, by developing new understandings, meanings and routines of using them.
• How rebound effects (increases in demand for energy services alongside technical efficiency improvements) are influenced by sociotechnical processes within households and wider society.
• How we think about and could take steps towards sufficiency (the idea of ‘enough’ energy services or other services), including how new technologies could contribute. 

In 2022 she completed her PhD in Science and Technology Policy at the University of Sussex Science Policy Research Unit (SPRU). This explored opportunities and challenges for insights from dominant and alternative problem framings (cultural approaches to thinking about problems and their solutions) to inform energy demand policy. As a guest lecturer for the Department of Engineering Science MSc Energy Systems, she helps students to think about the characteristics of different problem framings, why some are applied more frequently than others, and implications for energy demand governance.

She is interested in exploring how dominant problem framings influence other actors involved in energy transitions, such as community energy groups – particularly how they influence people’s sense of agency, emotions like anxiety and hope, and actions in relation to climate change. She also volunteers with her local community energy group, Rose Hill and Iffley Low Carbon.