Catherine Butler
Biographic Data
| ID | 132177 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Catherine Butler |
| GIVEN NAMES | Catherine |
| FAMILY NAME | Butler |
| SIGNATURE | BUTLER C |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Exeter |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-7589-9565 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 49 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 273 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 49 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1986 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 9 |
Community‐Led Adaptation, Weather Extremes, and Health and Wellbeing
Community‐led action is of increasing interest for policy, local government, and the design of adaptation under a changing climate. Previous research has shown how community‐led responses to climate impacts, such as flooding and heat, can be important in mitigating their ill health and wellbeing effects. But the evidence base on the character and nature of such actions by communities is at present scattered. In this paper, we review the internati…
Opportunities and challenges in community-led action on weather extremes for health and wellbeing
Communities play critical roles in mitigating health and wellbeing impacts from weather extremes such as heat, cold and flood events. Community-led actions in affected localities have been shown to be an important part of effective planning and response, particularly in supporting socially and economically marginalised populations. They have also been suggested to face multiple challenges limiting their ability to ensure continuity, scale up, and…
From climate scepticism to discourses of delay in UK editorials
News media has long been recognised for its important role in shaping public discourse and socio-political action relating to climate change. This is particularly true of opinion journalism, which reflects elite voices. Within the climate change communications literature, an important shift marks a turn away from outright denial of the existence of climate change towards delaying narratives. In this paper, we use a longitudinal mixed-methods anal…
Warm spaces as commoning: Rethinking energy poverty beyond the private doctrine
This paper argues for policy solutions addressing energy poverty to look beyond the level of individual households. Drawing on commons thinking and recent turns in geographical literature to the idea of commoning as a post‐capitalist response to the managing of needs and resources, this paper addresses keeping warm as a human need that can be met collectively. Through empirical research in ‘warm spaces’, which are community‐led responses to the g…
Energy geographies, interconnections, and embeddedness
In this commentary, we make a case for the inclusive and magnetic nature of energy geographies as a strength of the subdiscipline and cast it not so much as peripheral but embedded within and across multiple other disciplines. We recognise that such embeddedness still raises challenges for energy geographers and extend Ptak et al.'s analysis by discussing two future agendas and routes to repositioning that we see as particularly relevant in the c…
Narratives of Adults Registered Female at Birth Who Started a Medical Transition and Later Detransitioned
The visibility and presence of people who have detransitioned following a gender transition is growing, with an increase in research on the needs and experiences of this group. This study presents a thematic narrative analysis of interviews from six females (M = 25.5 yrs; range = 21–32 yrs). All detransitioned after having at least one gender-affirming medical or surgical treatment as part of a gender transition in the UK. Four narrative themes w…
Heard But Not Seen: Gardens and Their Child Ghosts in Rudyard Kipling, T. S. Eliot and Lucy M. Boston
The post-Romantic idealisation of childhood in much late-Victorian and Edwardian literature often makes use of a garden setting as a locus amoenus associated (like childhood itself) with qualities of innocence. There was inevitably a disjunction between this idealised image and the lives of actual children, however. One aspect of that difference was the high incidence of child mortality, a phenomenon notably absent from most Golden Age children’s…
Emerging Scholar Award
Phenomenology of gender dysphoria in autism: A multiperspective qualitative analysis
BACKGROUND: Autistic people are overrepresented in gender clinic settings, but limited evidence is available to guide clinical decision making for this patient group. We aimed to generate a comprehensive understanding of the phenomenology of gender dysphoria in autistic people. METHODS: We conducted a multi-perspectival interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA), from five different perspectives; autistic young people and adults with experien…
Health and wellbeing implications of adaptation to flood risk
Adaptation strategies to ameliorate the impacts of climate change are increasing in scale and scope around the world, with interventions becoming a part of daily life for many people. Though the implications of climate impacts for health and wellbeing are well documented, to date, adaptations are largely evaluated by financial cost and their effectiveness in reducing risk. Looking across different forms of adaptation to floods, we use existing li…
Emerging Scholar Award
Rethinking the off-grid city
There has been a resurgence in interest in the off-grid city in the Global South, and on how it functions as a collection of places, lived spaces, and dynamic infrastructural configurations. As scholars and practitioners working in the South African off-grid urban context, we identify four areas for further elaboration in off-grid urban research: 1.) redefining academic and practical understandings of the “grid”, ultimately moving to rethink its …
Rape myths in practice: The everyday work of accounting for rape survivors
‘Rape mythologising’ has been found to be a reason why survivors of rape feel blamed, and might contribute to low rates of reporting or conviction. No research to date examines whether ‘rape mythologising’ occurs in the conversations of sexual health staff when discussing rape cases. Conversation Analysis was used to analyse a focus group conversation between five sexual healthcare clinic staff who routinely provided support to rape survivors, on…
Lost Futures: Reading, Memory, and Repression
Children's novels sometimes allude to events in the lives of their protagonists after the end of the main narrative, either through the assertions of authoritative narrators or the speculations of child characters themselves. Such predictions offer a hostage to fortune, however, for history may take a different direction from that envisaged by the narrative. In such cases, readers must find a way to navigate the contradictions between fictional a…
Emerging Scholar Award
Three ways social identity shapes climate change adaptation
Adaptation to climate change is inescapably influenced by processes of social identity-how people perceive themselves, others, and their place in the world around them. Yet there is sparse evidence into the specific ways in which identity processes shape adaptation planning and responses. This paper proposes three key ways to understand the relationship between identity formation and adaptation processes: (a) how social identities change in respo…
Community Resilience and Well-Being: An Exploration of Relationality and Belonging after Disasters
This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Taylor & Francis via the DOI in this record
Metamorphoses of the Sublime: From Ballads and Gothic Novels to Contemporary Anglo-American Children's Literature . Kamila Vránková
Emerging Scholar Award
Japan Reads the Cotswolds: Children's Literature, Tourism, and the Japanese Imagination
Japan Reads the Cotswolds:Children's Literature, Tourism, and the Japanese Imagination Catherine Butler (bio) In the hot-spring town of Yufuin, on Japan's southern island of Kyushu, there is a small "British-style theme park" (Yufuin).1 Yufuin Floral Village, which opened for business in 2012, comprises a collection of shops, food stalls, and small-animal enclosures, each themed around a different figure from children's literature, film, or telev…
Self-harm prevalence and ideation in a community sample of cis, trans and other youth
Background: Trans youth have been reported to have high rates of self-harm, depression and bullying, and find it difficult to seek support. However, much of this research comes from gender identity clinics; non-clinical samples and those who reject gender binaries remain under-researched. Aims: This study investigated the experiences of a community school-based sample of Trans, identifying youth, Other, and cis-gendered adolescents in relation to…
Empathy, place and identity interactions for sustainability
British Children's Literature and the First World War
Narratives of recovery after floods: Mental health, institutions, and intervention
Rethinking energy demand governance: Exploring impact beyond ‘energy’ policy
The challenges of climate change and energy security, along with problems of fuel poverty and energy justice bring imperatives to create transitions in energy demand. Academic research and theory have begun to highlight the ways that government policies, strategies, and processes across wide-ranging areas of policy, from health to work and the economy, shape everyday practices with significant implications for energy demand. This brings focus on …
Public values for energy system change
In this paper we discuss the importance of framing the question of public acceptance of sustainable energy transitions in terms of values and a ‘whole-system’ lens. This assertion is based on findings arising from a major research project examining public values, attitudes and acceptability with regards to whole energy system change using a mixed-method (six deliberative workshops, n = 68, and a nationally representative survey, n = 2441), interd…
Empathy, place and identity interactions for sustainability
Energy consumption and everyday life: Choice, values and agency through a practice theoretical lens
In policy and research, there is increasing recognition that the scale of transitions necessary for a low carbon society will require significant reductions in energy demand. Concurrently, advancing knowledge about energy practices has been highlighted as important in developing a basis for the delivery of less energy intensive configurations. In this article, we examine interview (participant n = 53) and visual (photographic) data collected acro…
We are a community [but] that takes a certain amount of energy’: Exploring shared visions, social action, and resilience in place-based community-led energy initiatives
Critical moments? Life transitions and energy biographies
Family and youth research has highlighted the importance of lifecourse transitions, illustrating how they can have a substantial impact on people’s everyday lives and anticipated futures. Given their apparent significance, it is surprising that relatively little attention has been paid to life transitions – particularly unexpected ones – to explore how they can impact upon everyday energy use. This is a central concern of Energy Biographies proje…
Nuclear Power After Japan: The Social Dimensions
Community Resilience and Well-Being: An Exploration of Relationality and Belonging after Disasters
This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Taylor & Francis via the DOI in this record
Wellbeing in the aftermath of floods
The interactions between flood events, their aftermath, and recovery leading to health and wellbeing outcomes for individuals are complex, and the pathways and mechanisms through which wellbeing is affected are often hidden and remain under-researched. This study analyses the diverse processes that explain changes in wellbeing for those experiencing flooding. It identifies key pathways to wellbeing outcomes that concern perceptions of lack of age…
Rethinking the off-grid city
There has been a resurgence in interest in the off-grid city in the Global South, and on how it functions as a collection of places, lived spaces, and dynamic infrastructural configurations. As scholars and practitioners working in the South African off-grid urban context, we identify four areas for further elaboration in off-grid urban research: 1.) redefining academic and practical understandings of the “grid”, ultimately moving to rethink its …
Rethinking energy demand governance: Exploring impact beyond ‘energy’ policy
The challenges of climate change and energy security, along with problems of fuel poverty and energy justice bring imperatives to create transitions in energy demand. Academic research and theory have begun to highlight the ways that government policies, strategies, and processes across wide-ranging areas of policy, from health to work and the economy, shape everyday practices with significant implications for energy demand. This brings focus on …
Asking about the future: Methodological insights from energy biographies
Temporality is fundamental to qualitative longitudinal (QLL) research, inherent in the design of returning to participants over time, often to explore moments of change. Previous research has indicated that talking about the future can be difficult, yet there has been insufficient discussion of methodological developments to address these challenges. This paper presents insights from the Energy Biographies project, which has taken a QLL and multi…
Moral reasoning in adaptation to climate change
Moral foundations theory argues that moral reasoning is widely observed and fundamental to the legitimacy of relevant governance and policy interventions. A new analytical framework to examine and test how moral reasoning underpins and legitimizes governance and practice on adaptation to climate change risks is proposed. It develops a typology of eight categories of vulnerability-based and system-based moral reasoning that pertain to the dilemmas…
Risk analysis and climate change
There is an increasing emphasis on risk-based approaches in the scientific and economic assessment of climate change, exemplified by the Stern Report and IPPC 4th Assessment. In the United Kingdom, risk discourse also increasingly dominates environmental policy-making and governance. The use of risk assessment, management and communication practices in climate change governance and policy is critically examined, utilising an interpretation of ‘ri…
More on the Evolution of Cooperation
New structure is discovered in the suggestive “world” created by Axelrod, which is based on iterated play of the Prisoner's Dilemma game, and was studied to reveal how cooperative behavior can arise in a world of egoists. One of Axelrod's conclusions is that the viability of a strategy depends on how heavily the future is discounted. Our results explain in additional detail the nature of this dependence and suggest how a specific cooperative stra…
Landscapes of Threat? Exploring Discourses of Stigma around Large Energy Developments
In UK policy, concerns about climate change, energy security and system renewal, combine to create an imperative for transitions in landscapes of energy production. Some of the energy developments that will be central in these transitions are imbued with historical associations of, for example, ‘risk and threat’, which have been asserted to potentially lead to the stigmatisation of place and people in place. This paper explores stigmatisation thr…
Self-harm prevalence and ideation in a community sample of cis, trans and other youth
Background: Trans youth have been reported to have high rates of self-harm, depression and bullying, and find it difficult to seek support. However, much of this research comes from gender identity clinics; non-clinical samples and those who reject gender binaries remain under-researched. Aims: This study investigated the experiences of a community school-based sample of Trans, identifying youth, Other, and cis-gendered adolescents in relation to…
Energy Biographies: Narrative Genres, Lifecourse Transitions, and Practice Change
The problem of how to make the transition to a more environmentally and socially sustainable society poses questions about how such far-reaching social change can be brought about. In recent years, lifecourse transitions have been identified by a range of researchers as opportunities for policy and other actors to intervene to change how individuals use energy, taking advantage of such disruptive transitions to encourage individuals to be reflexi…
I'm not a tree hugger, I'm just like you: Changing Perceptions of Sustainable Lifestyles
For many in the Western world, there is increasing recognition of the fundamentally unsustainable nature of everyday actions and modes of consumption that form part of normal life. Some individuals attempt to challenge current ways of consuming and living in order to address these underlying issues. However, these efforts often continue to be positioned as unusual or unconventional, meaning that adopting sustainable lifestyles may be subject to w…
Narratives of recovery after floods: Mental health, institutions, and intervention
Health and wellbeing implications of adaptation to flood risk
Adaptation strategies to ameliorate the impacts of climate change are increasing in scale and scope around the world, with interventions becoming a part of daily life for many people. Though the implications of climate impacts for health and wellbeing are well documented, to date, adaptations are largely evaluated by financial cost and their effectiveness in reducing risk. Looking across different forms of adaptation to floods, we use existing li…
The Context for Community Participation in Health Action in Australia
Community participation is one of the underlying principles of democratic societies and the potential benefits of the participation process are well documented. Although a number of participatory mechanisms have been established by government departments and community agencies to facilitate community participation in health, few Australians regularly or actively participate. This paper examines the context for participation in health action in Au…
More on the Evolution of Cooperation
New structure is discovered in the suggestive “world” created by Axelrod, which is based on iterated play of the Prisoner's Dilemma game, and was studied to reveal how cooperative behavior can arise in a world of egoists. One of Axelrod's conclusions is that the viability of a strategy depends on how heavily the future is discounted. Our results explain in additional detail the nature of this dependence and suggest how a specific cooperative stra…
The Context for Community Participation in Health Action in Australia
Community participation is one of the underlying principles of democratic societies and the potential benefits of the participation process are well documented. Although a number of participatory mechanisms have been established by government departments and community agencies to facilitate community participation in health, few Australians regularly or actively participate. This paper examines the context for participation in health action in Au…
Increasing the confidence of nursing staff to address the sexual health needs of people living with HIV: The use of motivational interviewing
The need to promote safer sexual behaviour has taken on new urgency in the UK because of large increases in the number of sexually transmitted infections (STIs). The sexual health needs of people living with HIV and AIDS (PLHA) also require attention as part of health promotion efforts. Many sexual health clinics are however struggling with high demand and limited resources. Within this context, this paper describes an innovate attempt at STI pre…
Gothic Terms, Themes, Concepts and Contexts
Just as THE UNCANNY offers a connection to the structure of the unconscious, the abject offers a sensation of horror that connects us viscerally to the experience of repression and the process of subject formation. For Julia Kristeva, in Powers of Horror, abjection disturbs ‘identity, system, order’ and is characterised by ‘the in-between, the ambiguous, the composite’.
Risk analysis and climate change
There is an increasing emphasis on risk-based approaches in the scientific and economic assessment of climate change, exemplified by the Stern Report and IPPC 4th Assessment. In the United Kingdom, risk discourse also increasingly dominates environmental policy-making and governance. The use of risk assessment, management and communication practices in climate change governance and policy is critically examined, utilising an interpretation of ‘ri…
Perceptions of climate change and willingness to save energy related to flood experience
Nuclear Power After Japan: The Social Dimensions
Reading History in Children's Books
Ancestral Voices, Prophesying War
So far in this book we have steered a chronological course, from the Roman invasion of AD 43 through to the age of Victoria. One tendency that has remained relatively consistent in this journey is that, the later the period being discussed, the more historical sources tend to be available to those who might wish to write about it. With the age of Arthur we were dealing with a period for which there is relatively little archaeological evidence, an…
‘The Song is You’: How music works in Sesame therapy for clients with dementia
It is increasingly being recognized, both empirically by carers and through rapidly advancing research in music psychology and neuroscience, that music can assist the well-being of people living with dementia. In this article I show my work as a Sesame practitioner, demonstrating my therapeutic use of music and giving examples of how it speaks to the needs of this client group, including those of self-expression and relationship; and I show how m…
Feeling Queer or Queer Feelings?: Radical approaches to counselling sex, sexualities and genders
Creating a national citizen engagement process for energy policy
This paper examines some of the science communication challenges involved when designing and conducting public deliberation processes on issues of national importance. We take as our illustrative case study a recent research project investigating public values and attitudes toward future energy system change for the United Kingdom. National-level issues such as this are often particularly difficult to engage the public with because of their inher…
Examining the Dynamics of Energy Demand through a Biographical Lens
It is widely recognized that a major challenge in low carbon transitioning is the reduction of energy consumption. This implies a significant level of transformation in our ways of living, meaning the challenge is one that runs deep into the fabric of our personal lives. In this article we combine biographical research approaches with concepts from Bourdieu's practice theory to develop understanding of processes of change that embed particular pa…
Energy consumption and everyday life: Choice, values and agency through a practice theoretical lens
In policy and research, there is increasing recognition that the scale of transitions necessary for a low carbon society will require significant reductions in energy demand. Concurrently, advancing knowledge about energy practices has been highlighted as important in developing a basis for the delivery of less energy intensive configurations. In this article, we examine interview (participant n = 53) and visual (photographic) data collected acro…
Landscapes of Threat? Exploring Discourses of Stigma around Large Energy Developments
In UK policy, concerns about climate change, energy security and system renewal, combine to create an imperative for transitions in landscapes of energy production. Some of the energy developments that will be central in these transitions are imbued with historical associations of, for example, ‘risk and threat’, which have been asserted to potentially lead to the stigmatisation of place and people in place. This paper explores stigmatisation thr…
We are a community [but] that takes a certain amount of energy’: Exploring shared visions, social action, and resilience in place-based community-led energy initiatives
Asking about the future: Methodological insights from energy biographies
Temporality is fundamental to qualitative longitudinal (QLL) research, inherent in the design of returning to participants over time, often to explore moments of change. Previous research has indicated that talking about the future can be difficult, yet there has been insufficient discussion of methodological developments to address these challenges. This paper presents insights from the Energy Biographies project, which has taken a QLL and multi…
Public values for energy system change
In this paper we discuss the importance of framing the question of public acceptance of sustainable energy transitions in terms of values and a ‘whole-system’ lens. This assertion is based on findings arising from a major research project examining public values, attitudes and acceptability with regards to whole energy system change using a mixed-method (six deliberative workshops, n = 68, and a nationally representative survey, n = 2441), interd…
I'm not a tree hugger, I'm just like you: Changing Perceptions of Sustainable Lifestyles
For many in the Western world, there is increasing recognition of the fundamentally unsustainable nature of everyday actions and modes of consumption that form part of normal life. Some individuals attempt to challenge current ways of consuming and living in order to address these underlying issues. However, these efforts often continue to be positioned as unusual or unconventional, meaning that adopting sustainable lifestyles may be subject to w…
The grit in the oyster: Using energy biographies to question socio-technical imaginaries of ‘smartness’
It has been argued that responsible research and innovation (RRI) requires critique of the ‘worlds’ implicated in the future imaginaries associated with new technologies. Qualitative social science research can aid deliberation on imaginaries by exploring the meanings of technologies within everyday practices, as demonstrated by Yolande Strengers’ work on imaginaries of ‘smartness’. In this paper, we show how a novel combination of narrative inte…
Wellbeing in the aftermath of floods
The interactions between flood events, their aftermath, and recovery leading to health and wellbeing outcomes for individuals are complex, and the pathways and mechanisms through which wellbeing is affected are often hidden and remain under-researched. This study analyses the diverse processes that explain changes in wellbeing for those experiencing flooding. It identifies key pathways to wellbeing outcomes that concern perceptions of lack of age…
Energy Biographies: Narrative Genres, Lifecourse Transitions, and Practice Change
The problem of how to make the transition to a more environmentally and socially sustainable society poses questions about how such far-reaching social change can be brought about. In recent years, lifecourse transitions have been identified by a range of researchers as opportunities for policy and other actors to intervene to change how individuals use energy, taking advantage of such disruptive transitions to encourage individuals to be reflexi…
Rethinking energy demand governance: Exploring impact beyond ‘energy’ policy
The challenges of climate change and energy security, along with problems of fuel poverty and energy justice bring imperatives to create transitions in energy demand. Academic research and theory have begun to highlight the ways that government policies, strategies, and processes across wide-ranging areas of policy, from health to work and the economy, shape everyday practices with significant implications for energy demand. This brings focus on …
Critical moments? Life transitions and energy biographies
Family and youth research has highlighted the importance of lifecourse transitions, illustrating how they can have a substantial impact on people’s everyday lives and anticipated futures. Given their apparent significance, it is surprising that relatively little attention has been paid to life transitions – particularly unexpected ones – to explore how they can impact upon everyday energy use. This is a central concern of Energy Biographies proje…
Moral reasoning in adaptation to climate change
Moral foundations theory argues that moral reasoning is widely observed and fundamental to the legitimacy of relevant governance and policy interventions. A new analytical framework to examine and test how moral reasoning underpins and legitimizes governance and practice on adaptation to climate change risks is proposed. It develops a typology of eight categories of vulnerability-based and system-based moral reasoning that pertain to the dilemmas…
Psychology (29 works) · Sociology (26 works) · Political science (21 works) · Computer Science (13 works) · Social Psychology (13 works) · Epistemology (11 works) · Art (10 works) · Energy (signal processing (10 works) · Social Acceptance of Renewable Energy (10 works) · Geography (9 works)