ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to outline a range of dominant approaches to light seen in social science and humanities, and focuses on how light is entangled in social practices and meanings as an addition to the more technical, medical and aesthetic approaches. It illustrates how light is not only shed on things – as in creating more energy-efficient light – but also for things, in processes where social norms and preferences change or adapt lighting technologies. The chapter looks at the role of light in solving social problems, such as security in urban spaces, and the social life different technologies originate from or have helped forge. The shift to new lighting technologies has also meant the rapid development of new ways of lighting private and public spaces. Light as energy, light as health and light as security represent the vast majority of scholarship on light, while social science and humanities research is particularly present in the historical accounts of technological changes.
