Sustainable Consumption Institute (SCI) Photography Competition 2015

‘Sustainability, Infrastructures and Social Change’

We invite photographers to submit a maximum of 3 images per person on the Competition topic,‘Sustainability, Infrastructures and Social Change’ This competition opens on the 1st February 2015 and will close on the 30th April 2015 with the winners being announced later in the month and winning entries posted to the SCI website.

1st Prize – £100 2nd Prize – £75 3rd Prize – £50 2 x Runner Ups – £25

As well as a cash prize, all five winners will receive a copy of their image reproduced onto canvas courtesy of the SCI and copies of these will also hang in the offices of the Sustainable Consumption Institute at the University of Manchester. (Please note all submitted images will be reproduced with the owners’ consent under the ‘Attribution NonCommercial-ShareAlike’ Creative Commons license).

In order to guide your choice of image please read the following notes:

The SCI’s focus is loosely organised around three key research themes which form the parameters of this particular photo competition. Namely, these are:

1. Everyday practices What is distinctive about our approach to consumption is that we look beyond individual choice towards the social organisation of ordinary and habitual everyday practices, and how they relate to changing infrastructures, policy and power.

2. Innovation

The SCI also seeks to identify, understand and advance the prospects for accelerating social and technological innovation in the area of sustainability.

3. Visions and Politics

Our focus is on how cultural understandings are produced and on the effects that they have on the patterns of everyday practices and innovation processes. We are interested in specific visions and politics around, for example, waste; accounting for the ebb and flow of interest in specific issues such as climate change; and in how longer standing cultural institutions (neoliberalism, egalitarianism, deep ecology) are reproduced through the framings of sustainability problems and solutions.

The challenge for photographers is to capture an image that reflects in some way one or more of the SCI’s research themes in a novel and perhaps provocative way.

All submissions to be uploaded to the SCI Flickr account at: