16 June 2006

Prof. Dick Eiser wins share of £1m grant

Dick Eiser has won a £1m grant from the Leverhulme Trust with colleagues in Cardiff (lead) and UEA for a project is entitled "Framing Energy Future and Risk: Exploring Public Understandings."

The University of Sheffield share will be approximately £200k and will pay for one post doc for four years from January 2007 (Chris Jones) plus a three year PhD studentship. An extract from the summary is below:

"Framing Energy Future and Risk: Exploring Public Understandings."

"Rising concerns about the global impacts of climate change have prompted an intensified political debate, in the UK and internationally, around the feasibility of various energy policy options, as a means of delivering on climate change mitigation.. Alongside economic, resource and technical factors, a major constraint on energy policy, in the UK as elsewhere, will be how various energy futures - and their attendant perceived risks and benefits - are understood by members of the public..

The research objective at the heart of this proposal is to gain an in-depth understanding of how the contemporary science and policy framings of the energy issue interact with oublic understanding and responses. To achieve this we will investigate the contemporary framings of the energy issue in science and policy discourses, and the responses of members of the public to these."