The sensuous secrets of shelter: how recollections of food stimulate Irish men's reconstructions of their early formative residential experiences in Leicester, Sheffield and Manchester

This paper examines the intersection between food, recollection and Irish migrants’ reconstructions of their housing pathways in the three English cities of Leicester (East Midlands), Sheffield (South Yorkshire) and Manchester (North). Previous studies have acknowledged more implicitly the role of memory in representing the Irish migrant experience in England. Here, we adopt a different stance. We explore the mnemonic power of food to encode, decode and recode Irish men’s reconstructions of their housing pathways in England when constructing and negotiating otherness. In doing so, we apply a ‘Proustian anthropological’ approach in framing the men’s representations of their formative residential experiences in the boarding houses of the three English cities during the 1950s and 1960s are examined. The extent to which food provided in the boarding houses was used as an instrument of discipline and control is examined. The relevance of food related acts of resistance, food insecurity and acts of hedonic meat-centric eating in constructing the men’s sociocultural identity are also explored

Coping with extremes, creating comfort: User experiences of 'low-energy' homes in Australia

Low- and zero-energy homes are core elements in transitioning the housing stock towards a more environmentally sustainable model that responds to concerns about climate change and the need for energy demand reduction. Whilst there is a growing body of work on the technical performance of these homes, less attention has been paid to the experiences of users, particularly in cooling-dominated climates. Drawing on interviews that utilise an oral history approach with householders in Lochiel Park Green Village in South Australia, this research situates experiences and energy practices within individual housing histories in order to better understand the relationship between the occupant, the building and the resultant energy use. Within the context of debates around adaptive comfort practices this innovative method reveals that, despite the expectations of some residents, moving to a 'low-energy' home has reduced rather than eliminated their active involvement in maintaining a thermally comfortable environment