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Contribution short abstract

Based on ethnography of heat pump adoption, this paper uses STS and feminist care ethics to analyse domestic sensory disruption and uneven agency. It shows how households contest green-growth paradigms through tinkering, humanizing, and repair, revealing relational dimensions of energy transitions.

Contribution long abstract

This contribution draws on ethnographic research on heat pump installations in Dutch housing to explore two intertwined dimensions of household energy transitions: the sensory reconfiguration of everyday life and the uneven distribution of agency, particularly between tenants and homeowners. Framed through feminist care ethics, the heat pump is understood not as a neutral efficiency device but as a materialization of care and power. In domestic spaces, it privileges techno-economic ideals of rational control, optimization, and autonomy, often subordinating relational and embodied forms of care that sustain everyday life.

Lower-temperature, continuous heating displaces familiar sensory cues, producing discomfort or anxiety, especially for bodies that diverge from assumed norms, including women, elderly, and disabled residents. Noise, thermal, and air quality standards are inscribed through the technology, enforcing bodily and sensorial homogeneity. Homeowners may frame such disruption as minor inconveniences within a project of ecological self-improvement, whereas tenants, who often face opaque, imposed systems that leave little room for negotiation or repair, are disproportionally burdened by the sensorial, cognitive, and emotional labour of adaptation. Care in these cases takes a paternalistic form.

By situating household practices alongside questions of class, agency, and infrastructural power, this research interrogates the dominant focus on innovation and green growth, which often obscures relational and affective dimensions of energy. In dialogue with ecofeminist and decolonial perspectives, it asks how attention to domestic care, sensorial engagement, and contested agency can open space for alternative, relational, and ethically grounded energy futures.