Department of Sociology

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Speaker: Diana Hernández, associate professor of sociolmedical sciences at Columbia University.

Powerless: The Hidden Hardship of Energy Insecurity in America

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Energy serves as the lifeblood of our daily experiences. It permeates virtually every aspect of our existence, facilitating nourishment, safety, and productivity. When affordability threatens energy’s availability, a family’s living situation can become untenable—too cold, too hot, too dark, and too often, unhealthy and unsafe. In Powerless, sociologists Diana Hernández and Jennifer Laird reveal the hidden hardship of “energy insecurity” – the inability to adequately meet household energy needs.

Approximately one in ten households in the U.S. are energy insecure and four in ten are at risk for energy insecurity. These statistics alone do not convey the acute pain of utility shutoffs, or the relentless toll of chronic energy hardships marked by difficult choices and harsh living conditions. Drawing on survey data and interviews with one hundred energy-insecure individuals and families, Hernández and Laird detail the experience of energy insecurity. Individuals and families suffering from energy insecurity endure economic hardships, such as difficulty paying utility bills, utility debt, and disconnection from utility services. They also struggle with physical challenges, such as poor housing conditions and poor or dysfunctional heating and cooling systems. They are often forced to make difficult choices about what bills to pay. These decisions are sometimes referred to as “heat or eat?” choices, as families cannot afford to pay for heating and food at the same time. Energy insecure individuals and families employ a variety of strategies to keep energy costs down to avoid having to make these hard choices. This includes deliberate underconsumption of energy, enduring physical discomfort, and using dangerous alternatives such as open flames, ovens, or space heaters to try to maintain a comfortable temperature in their home. To be energy insecure is to suffer. Despite the heavy toll of energy insecurity, most people confront these difficulties behind closed doors, believing it is a private matter. Thus, the enormous social crisis of energy insecurity goes unnoticed.

Hernández and Laird argue that household energy is a basic human right and detail policies and practices that would expand access to consistent, safe, clean, and affordable energy. Their proposals include improving the current energy safety net, which is limited and often does not serve the most energy insecure due to stringent program requirements and administrative burdens. They also suggest redesigning rates to accommodate income, promoting enrollment and expansion of discount programs, reforming utility disconnection policies, improving energy literacy, and ensuring an equitable shift to renewable energy resources.

Powerless creates a comprehensive picture of the complex social and environmental issue of energy insecurity and shows how energy equity is not just an aspiration but an achievable reality.

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Presented by Alex V. Barnard, Assistant Professor of Sociology at New York University (NYU)

Is there an underlying order to how societies classify, treat, and control madness? Both popular and scholarly portrayals of contemporary mental health systems emphasize service fragmentation and inter-professional competition. In this talk, I draw on a year of in-depth fieldwork in France, including observations in a public mental health clinic, social service office, and courts, supplemented with nearly two-hundred interviews with administrators and clinicians, to show the underlying logic to the trajectories of people with serious mental illness through the welfare state. As I show, decision-making across these sites is linked by a shared conception, both embedded in formal policy and informal practices, of what makes someone a malade—a real mentally-ill person. This strong medical and bureaucratic identity ties this population to a paternalist, protective psychiatric system, in sharp contrast to the U.S., where the absence of a clear administrative category for this population leads to a chaotic mix of coercion and care from jails, shelters, and hospitals. While these results reveal the power of the French state to construct a particular definition of what it means to have a serious mental illness, I show how defining the population in this way constrains attempts to reform the system. This talk suggests how the dynamic interplay between categories adopted in official policy, used in professional practice, and adopted by populations themselves can reproduce national differences, even in an era where psychiatric knowledge and medical treatment are converging across national borders. 

Speaker

Alex V. Barnard is an assistant professor of sociology at New York University and holds a PhD in sociology from the University of California, Berkeley. His work examines medical and bureaucratic decision-making, welfare policy, and social control comparatively. His previous book, Conservatorship: Inside California's System of Coercion and Care for Mental Illness (Columbia University Press), examines California's involuntary treatment system, showing how a failure of government oversight and inter-agency coordination leads to the extensive use of coercive interventions that provide neither care nor control. Ongoing projects include examining trends in national legislation around involuntary psychiatric treatment, analyzing variation in the policing of protests and university responses to the 2024 student protest encampments, and the governance of emerging addictions to online gambling and AI.

Co-hosted by the Department of Sociology Colloquium Series

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Christine Percheski, Associate Professor of Sociology at Northwestern University, will give a talk as part of the Sociology Colloquium spring series. 

Talk title & abstract forthcoming.

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Adam Reich, Professor of Sociology at Columbia University, will give a talk as part of the Sociology Colloquium spring series.

Talk title & abstract forthcoming.