Oral history provides a means of understanding heating behaviour through encouraging respondents to articulate the past in terms of stories. Unlike other qualitative methods, oral history foregrounds the ontology of personal experiences in a way that is well suited to revealing previously undocumented phenomena in the private world of the home. Three types of change may be distinguished: long term historical change, change associated with the life-cycle stage of the individual and sudden change. A sample of eight in-depth interviews is used to demonstrate the potential of oral history in the study of home heating. The themes to emerge from the interviews include early memories of the home, the financial struggle to heat the home, the influence of childhood experiences in adulthood and the association between warmth and comfort. For the future, domestic comfort, energy conservation and carbon reduction need to be reconciled with one another. Finally, a third type -and this is the interest here -comprises the personal stories of individuals that may be collected to create oral history.The aim is to provide a 'proof of concept' of oral history in energy research, that is to say a demonstration of its feasibility, validity and usefulness. The aim is, therefore, not just to demonstrate the methodology, but to show how oral history can be used to illuminate issues. Other researchers are, at present, using oral storytelling methods to illustrate and engage the public in histories of the use and exploitation of energy by local communities in the UK.1 'Coal fires, steel houses and the man in the moon', byDarby (2017), published in this same special edition, has a similar theme in revealing the story of a local experiences of energy transition. In addition, public engagement is a theme in large-scale storytelling exercises undertaken by the mass media, for example by the US National Public Radio 2 and the British Broadcasting Corporation.3 However, searches undertaken by the paper's authors have not identified any comparable study, in the UK or elsewhere, using storytelling and specifically the methods of oral history to investigate heating as an aspect of the history of the home.The paper is divided into three main sections:First: an explanation of the advantages and distinctiveness of oral history;Secondly, a review of the themes that might be expected to arise in the stories of respondents; andFinally an analysis of the accounts given by eight respondents. Why storytelling as oral history?Oral history is an extension of various qualitative and survey research methods that seek to capture previously undocumented phenomena in the private world of the house and home-a world that technologists, designers and energy researchers can struggle to access (Stevenson and Leaman, 2010

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

This paper uses oral history to consider the relative merits of symbolic interactionism in revealing new insights regarding the Irish immigration experience in England during the 1950s and 1960s. Using a variety of rubrics attributed to Canadian sociologist Erving Goffman, I critically examine the nature of identity work performed by Irish men and women when in their new host country. The paper highlights the interface between citizenship and sociocultural identity epitomised by both the use props (corporeal modifications) and the power of sign vehicles, notably Irish accents in shaping the nature of social interactions. The extent to which Goffman neglects sensory driven constructs of identity is highlighted. The way in Irish immigrants negotiated two simultaneous worlds front and back stage in response to the anticipated reaction of the given audience evokes the metaphor of a revolving door of identity fluid and chameleon like in nature. Actions were at times driven the anticipated reactions of others following presentation but then reclaimed elsewhere manifested by front and back stage behaviours. The Irish men and women worked inside and alongside systems of control where their identities were contested, ambiguous, or problematised to create a fluid sense of self (selves).

The famished soul: resonance and relevance of the Irish Famine to Irish men's accounts of hunger following immigration to England during the 1950s and 1960s

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.