Lee Towers

Currently I'm conducting a postdoc study of intergenerational justice and dealing with the UK's nuclear waste. In this project I'm looking into literature and thinking around the concept of deep time - both the past and the future. This takes me into anthropological and archaelogical literatures as well as the literature of decolonisation and indigenous philisophies. I also explore the theory and practice of deliberative democracy including a relatively new idea of intergenerational democracy which argues that one unifying feature we share is age and aging and that the very old and young are marginalised in our socieities. Thus, these groups should be engaged in democratic endeavours.

My PhD explored energy justice and the UK's energy transition, focusing on the community energy sector. In this PhD I used ethnographic methods of participant observation as well as focus groups and semi structured interviews. In terms of theories I used an overall governmentality approach, informed by World-Ecology and decolonial theory. While doing this PhD, I trained in quantitative data analysis and used these skills to co-design a research project on intergenerational fairness at University of Brighton, as well as analyse fuel poverty datasets.

2024 January: contribution to panel at Nuclear Waste Services annual conference

Title: Early Career Researchers: the Challenges and Opportunities

2024 January: Presentation to Nuclear Wastes Services annual conference

Title: Intergenerational Justice, Intergenerational Democracy and Nuclear Waste  

2023 November: Presentation to panel at Society for the Social Study of Science

Title: Nuclear past, present and futures, inclusions and exclusions

 2023 August: Presentation at Summer School at University of Groningen:  The Lives of the Subsurface during the Energy Transition                           

Title: The Temporal and Spatial Challenges of a GDF

2022: Academic Article 

Title: Can liberalised electricity markets deliver on climate change and energy poverty? Evidence from community projects in Great Britain

2021: Report University of Brighton

Title: Understanding fairness between different generations in times of COVID-19

2021: Article The Conversation

Title: Why the UK’s unfair energy market is unlikely to spearhead a green transition