Configuring Light/Staging the Social: Dialogues between the social sciences and lighting practices

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Light is a material through which we organize social space; light is the infrastructure of everyday modern life and without it much of what we do and take for granted would not be possible:for example, if we only had natural light, invevitably nightime activities would be severely reduced with a significant impact on the forms of social life that can be sustained. The benefits of our technological manipulation of artificial light are immense: the contemporary city's economy critically depends upon it, heritage and creative industries require it (the lighting of great public buildings an important part of city branding, for example) and much of what constitutes the civil governance of cities (crime, safety and security) takes light as the fundemental basic requirement. Moreover, as part of creative industry, manufacture and maintenance, lighting is a major economic sector. At the same time, the ecological costs of our energy consumption are also hotly debated and are consequently framed within political discourse and public policy, as new lighting technologies and EU regulations attempt to create sustainable energies. In addition, light (and its absence - darkness) are critical to our health, as for example in the regulation of sleep, mood and well-being and can entail significant health reactions if not properly regulated (as highlighted by the case of SAD and by increasing concerns with light pollution. These debates and issues are the broader social context for our seminar series, 'Configuring Light/Staging the Social', which aims to forge an intergrated dialogue between social sciences, design, architecture and urban planning focused on this most fundamental feature of social life. Surprising, given the importance of light as outlined above, there has been little integrated thinking and research on light. While it is a central concern to technicians, architects, engineers or designers and some policy makers, it has largely been ignored or little researched within the social sciences. While it would be seem important to draw academic attention to this most critical social material, practitioners' technical and design knowledge would also benefit from a more rigorous understanding of the social and cultural aspects and impact of their practice. However, thus far, little dialogue has taken place across these different disciplines and between academics and practitioners. Our seminar series aims to both address the gap in social science knowledge about light and put if firmly on the academic agenda within disciplines such as sociology, geography and anthropology, for example; while at the same time to bridge the divide between academic knolwedge and the technical and design knowledge of light engineers, architects and designers and urban planners. This dialogue between social science and practitioners should have considerable impact: our aim is to produce both knowledges and methodologies for better researching the ways in which light is configured and the roles it plays in structuring social life and it is envisaged that these new ways of thinking and working with light will directly impact on those practitioners in indusry and urban planning.