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Accounts of the circular economy deal with lives of objects mainly through notions of repair, sharing and re-use. This has led to problems associated with contemporary discourses of circularity including the tendency to focus on goods in isolation, and to overlook longer term trends in demand. Drawing from studies of material culture and practice, in this Perspective article we make the case for a more subtle analysis of practices and “object relations”. This allows us to engage with basic questions about production, consumption, and the constitution of need–questions that should be integral to contemporary debates about the circular economy, but that are sidelined in what remains classically economistic discussions of substitution, manufacturing, and waste.

This thesis is about the provision of first aid and the changing roles of first aid practitioners and healthcare professionals in an ecology of healthcare. Rather than treating first aid as a fixed body of knowledge to be instilled in first aid practitioners and healthcare professionals through training and courses, I focus on how the boundaries of first aid and help are constituted and enacted and how expertise is distributed between professionals and practitioners. As I show, the spatial and temporal organisation of first aid is crucial for actual and potential patients and the careers of The British Red Cross volunteers. To capture aspects of this dynamic, I make use of Bowker and Star’s (1999) account of boundaries and categories, Lave and Wenger’s (1991) work on situated learning and Abbott’s (1988) concept of professionalisation. This thesis is based on an empirical study of The British Red Cross Event First Aid Service. This service provided medical support for major sporting and leisure events until it was disbanded in 2020. As well as observing five events between August - November 2019, I interviewed ten first aid volunteers, attended The British Red Cross training programmes and conferences, and gathered secondary sources and historical materials relating to the development of The British Red Cross and related parts of the healthcare system, particularly the history of the UK ambulance service. Together, these materials help to show that the provision of first aid is situated within a wider ‘ecology’ of care that continues to evolve. I argue that the structure of this ecology matters for the day-to-day experience of volunteers, what they do, how their careers are organised, and for how first aid is delivered in space and time. The thesis concludes that first aid is a product of these arrangements and of situated but always dynamic relations between the careers of professionals and volunteers. Key words: first-aid, healthcare, organisation, boundaries

Decarbonisation depends on using sources of energy which are both renewable and intermittent. Demands for energy also fluctuate over time (i.e., daily and annual patterns). Storage technologies provide a means of managing these fluctuations in supply and demand. In this video, a hypothetical policymaker meets with a series of academic researchers to discuss the question: how much storage do we need in a fully electrified future?

This video explores how demand side interventions like dynamic pricing, energy tariffs and carbon alerts might be misguided in missing out on the relationship between the timing of energy use and the timing of daily activities. This is because energy is not used for its own sake, but in the accomplishment of everyday activities like eating, working, and television watching. Making use of radial graphs that show when 10,000 people were carrying out activities in 2014 to 2015, the video examines the relationships between activities that are more or less fixed in time, and others that may – at first glance – appear to be more ‘flexible’. Because of these kinds of relationships, it doesn’t make sense to think about the timing of different activities one by one. Instead, when we put them together, we start to see something of the mass interconnections that make up a social rhythm. Interventions that encourage individuals to shift the timing of their energy consumption miss the point that the timing of demand is embedded in the timing of everyday life.