This inter-institutional studentship proposal involving the Universities of St Andrews and Edinburgh, developed in collaboration with the James Hutton Institute, will explore van dwelling in Scotland, specifically the relationship between van dwelling and sustainability.
Home life is of fundamental importance in contemporary society. Van dwelling is emerging as trend encouraged by housing market challenges as well as digital/remote working opportunities and can be motivated by choice or necessity. This project will capture and give voice to the experiences of those living in vans, sharing these across groups (e.g., policy, practitioners) to create constructive public dialogue and understanding. It also seeks to understand how van dwelling relates to sustainability, specifically what the dwellers themselves see as their main impacts/contributions. These insights will be important to share to shape ‘mainstream’ understandings of the connection between sustainability and home life, contributing to diversifying the experience of the Just Transition, and generating new ideas of how this may be done.
Core to the studentship will be the development of a novel qualitative methodology built around ‘cultural probes’. Informed by design-thinking, cultural probes are an extension of traditional diary studies, often using multimedia (but also analogue) tools to collect data about everyday life and experiences. Such a method is particularly suited to participants who may be ‘on-the-move’ and remotely spread. Critically, the cultural probes will be co-designed with van dwellers themselves, across a 3-phase research design.
Supervisory Team:
- First Supervisor: Dr Louise Reid, lar9@st-andrews.ac.uk
- Second Supervisor: Dr Rachel Hunt, rachel.hunt@ed.ac.uk
