Jessel et al. note that their goal was "to comprehensively understand the predictors and outcomes of energy insecurity" (2019, 13). They also remark that the literature "demonstrated a clear lack of cohesion and systematic guidelines around research on household energy," which, according to the authors, posed a "formidable challenge" to their ability to "synthesize the literature and draw conclusions from it" (2019, 13).
I find these commitments to comprehesiveness and synthesis be in contradition to the authors commitments to intersectionality and to the fact that "energy insecurity is a complex problem, and it does not occur in a vacuum" (2019, 10). Despite all of their rich documentation of diversity, here at the end they seem to fall back on the scientistic idea that scholars need to develop a single, comprehensive logic that encompasses this diversity in order to be able to move forward. This drive for uniformity neglects the feminist observation that "there is no singular or uniform social timespace in contemporary capitalism" (Bear et al. 2015). The world is an inextricably messy place; but this messiness is actually a resource, rather than a problem. It provides us with potential "lines of flight" that help us escape the compunction for enclosure, territorialization, and totalization (Deleuze and Guattari 1987). And ethnography, styled as "thick description" is a method of tapping into the transformative potential of that resource. As JK Gibson-Graham point out, "The revolutionary contribution of thick description and weak theory is to help make these otherwise hidden pathways apparent" (2014, 151).
