| Phillip Vannini (Professor and Canada Research Chair, Royal Roads University) |
| Thu 02 Apr 2015, 15:30 - 16:30 |
| Old Library Drummond Street |
If you have a question about this talk, please contact: Claire MacDonnell (clairema)
Off-grid isn’t a state of mind. It isn’t about someone being out of touch, about a place that is hard to get to, or about a weekend spent offline. Off-grid is the property of a building (generally a home but sometimes even a whole town) that is disconnected from the electricity and the natural gas grid. To live off-grid, therefore, means having to radically re-invent domestic life as we know it. Through film, photography, and writing this ethnography explores the day-to-day lives of people in each of Canada’s provinces and territories living off the grid. We demonstrate how a variety of people, all with different environmental constraints, live away from energy infrastructures. We also raise important questions about our social future and whether off-grid living creates an environmentally and culturally sustainable lifestyle practice. We suggest that these homes are experimental labs for our collective future, an intimate look into unusual contemporary domestic lives, and a call to the rest of us leading ordinary lives to examine what we take for granted.