‘Story of My Village’: Participatory Arts Based Methods and Acts of Thinking Energizing Change in Rural India

Our work is a collection of artefacts: drawings, storyboards, films, music and poems created by a tribal community in rural India during interactive workshops which used various participatory arts-based methods to tell stories about the experiences related to a new solar powered community building. Energy use is deeply connected with human cultures, practices, norms and values. This article challenges assumptions about linear progress between energy access and women’s empowerment, demonstrating that the impact is not immediate but requires social adaptation over time. It gradually uncovers complex power dynamics and social hierarchy within the tight-knit community. This article is also a five-year journey (2019–2024) of four different researchers from diverse backgrounds and their attempts to capture and edit various acts of thinking surfaced through these methods. As global momentum towards sustainable energy gathers pace, our work reflects different ways of engaging, stimulating various ways of thinking and structuring dialogue about energy transition within the community. We focus on the potential of these methods to capture the embodied dimensions in the forms of artefacts as shown in the film. We position our work as a novel approach in energy studies that uses the lens of embodied research to understand the frictions of social realities in energy transitions, and surfaces hidden factors like socio-economic status, stakeholders’ involvement, and the critical role of gender in energy.