Open Panels

According to LaDuke and Cowen (2020, 245), infrastructure is not inherently colonial: a pipe can carry fresh water or toxic sludge. The frustrated possibilities of infrastructures can endow them with an affective form of politics. Building on Kai Bosworth’s (2023) dual notion of affective infrastructures—physical infrastructures generate specific affects, but affects also undergird political movements—this panel explores forms of affect in the perception of extractive and vital infrastructures, their linkages and their environmental and social reverberations. Our goal is to unravel how energy projects, and the communities and ecosystems they impact, are rendered (in)visible, (il)legible, and ultimately (in)significant through the intervention of various tactics of mediation amid the energy transition. Drawing on Elysia French and Amanda White (2024), who challenge researchers to consider how we might account for the visual and sensorial evidence that is often overlooked by dominant capitalistic-colonial ideologies, we invite inquiries into the role of art, embodiment, psychoanalysis, and visuality in ushering diverse and ambivalent responses to extractive projects—from fervently favourable, to merely acquiescent, moderately skeptical or outright hostile, amongst others—and how these then inform and nurture different political factions and their actions. Infrastructure development is central to decarbonization, but to bring about an energy transition that is radically just will require the mobilization of political affects and social infrastructures of care and environmental knowledge.

This panel asks: What insights can attention to subjective experience, the senses, the body, and the unconscious as important sites of (un)knowing bring to an understanding of shifting perceptions of energy infrastructures? What can a focus on affect reveal about the relationships between desire and energy futurities? How are various feelings about energy infrastructure generated, mediated, and sustained, and what actions do these in turn enable and constrain?

 Panel Convenors: Laurence Butet-Roch, Isaac Thornley & Alexandra Watt Simpson
Contact: [email protected]

Energy infrastructures perhaps more clearly than any infrastructural form illustrate the intimately political nature of infrastructure, tied to the shifting power relations across several scales, which may advance, slow down, or change the shape of the ongoing energy transition. Dams, solar panels or pipelines materialize and fix specific power constellations in space; they have both transformative potential and may deepen conflict This panel aims to advance political geography debates on the politics of energy infrastructures across scales. We start from a trivial but conceptually challenging premise. To actually grasp the political practices in infrastructure planning, be they participatory and justice-oriented or authoritarian, we have to take into account both the agency of people in locations that frequently face adverse conditions and the transregional connections or dependencies conditioning energy transition infrastructure. We ask for papers that foreground the relations between practices by both state and corporate actors that slowly diminish or even eliminate opposition, depoliticize through bureaucratic logics or dislocate root causes through apparent dialogue — and on repertoires and strategies that subvert such practices, produce collective claims and even succeed in the refusal of colonial infrastructures. In this sense, we ask how those contesting energy infrastructures organize across contexts and scales, against whom, and for which purpose. Stories of successful activism against infrastructure “development” projects complicate the picture of smooth, if authoritarian implementation, because they account for multiple layers of political agency.

Panel Convenors: Alke Jenss & Alessandra Bonci

What is heat and how do we study it?  Heat is illusive. Heat is present or absent. Heat is intimately bound to the human body. Heat is oppressive. It sustains life, and heat kills. The affective experience of heat is relational between and even within bodies. Shifting meanings of heat and representations of it reveal political and economic power.  Extractivist logics and legacies of colonialism contribute to the creation and shaping of infrastructures of heat as diverse as domestic heat networks, industrial cooling systems and climate-controlled spaces.

This panel invites paper proposals that apply qualitative methods and theory to situating the affective experience and material properties of heat—through the entire thermal range—alongside socio-culturally constructed ideas about politics, power, equity, rights, economy and perhaps most crucially—the role of human societies in managing, minimising and mitigating the impacts of heat on non-human worlds.

Since Mauss, ethnographic engagements with heat have reflected dominant theoretical discourses, yet heat itself has rarely appeared, or been theorised directly. Rather, heat is framed via other phenomena, and as a vector for other values. Reinforcing the notion that heat is a relational category, heat appeared obliquely in qualitative research, for example as part of anthropologists’ field diaries, as they recorded their subjective affective experience of heat as somehow separate to the lived realities they were studying (Venkat, 2020). How, therefore, does heat become an object of academic study? A focus on infrastructures of heat, we suggest, helps to frame heat more clearly as an ethnographic object, rendered thus through different and sometimes competing processes of making.

Qualitative research and writing with heat considers interrelations between bodies, places and politics that other framings do not allow for. The affective and undeniably “felt” experience of heat has led to framings of embodiment, affect and phenomenological accounts, which situate heat as a material reality that can be discovered and experienced. Heat, equally, acts as agent via the devastating impacts of its extremes. This affective reality of heat, while differentiated and oftentimes unequally felt, suggests it is a material-discursive category, able to mobilise thought and action across different conceptual regimes. Heat, though, is also political as architectural theorists and urban studies scholars have shown impactfully (Chang 2024). Heat becomes a political object when a rights-based framework is applied to understand the intersecting inequalities that deliver too much—or too little—heat, as well as the impact that extreme heat has on other infrastructures, material or conceptual.

Panel Convenors: Simone Abram & Elaine Forde
Contact: [email protected]

Peripheral yet pivotal, islands and other energy grid-remote regions are increasingly turning into hotspots for renewable energy investments. Behind this development promise lies an often-complex reality where innovation collides with infrastructure constraints, environmental trade-offs, and the unintended consequences of decarbonisation. Exploring these challenges offers a window into the broader risks and opportunities of the global energy transition.

This panel session will focus on the dual and co-existent phenomena of ‘energy islands’ and ‘island energy’. We understand energy islands as infrastructurally marginalised places that lack sufficient connectivity, accessibility and investments in infrastructure, energy and fuel provision and therefore struggle with fuel and transport poverty, energy insecurity and/or decarbonisation. In contrast, we understand island energy as the new frontiers of energy generation – regions far from traditional ‘power’ centres that are now in the spotlight of renewable energy investments, innovation and infrastructural developments, such as related to offshore wind. While the second phenomenon might suggest solving the first phenomenon when happening in the same place, this panel critically explores cases where both processes seem to flourish in conjunction; in other words, where island energy further marginalises communities in place. Consequently, we discuss the importance of alternative perceptions to island energy characterised, for instance, by smaller-scale and self-determined energy pathways directly targeted at overcoming energy islands. Topics to be addressed range from place identification and transition resistance to local energy entrepreneurship, from energy injustices to co-mmunity benefits and energy democracy, from deprived isolated townships to empowered and sustainable communities, from aging insufficient infrastructure to innovative microgrids and peer-to-peer networks.

Encouraging interdisciplinary and cross-sectoral engagement, this panel advances critical debates within energy geographies, rural development, and just transition politics by conceptualising the simultaneous and often contradictory dynamics of infrastructural marginalisation and energy transition investment. Through the dual lens of ‘energy islands’ and ‘island energy’, the session interrogates how processes of decarbonisation and infrastructural expansion intersect with, and at times exacerbate, existing spatial, environmental and socio-economic inequities. By foregrounding empirical cases where renewable energy development coexists with or even reinforces energy insecurity, the panel contributes to nuanced understandings of the uneven geographies of energy transitions. Furthermore, by engaging with concepts such as energy justice, energy democracy, and community-led innovation, the session proposes alternative frameworks for examining and addressing peripheral energy futures, offering insights into how place-based, participatory approaches might resist or enable energy transitions.

Panel Convenors: Cornelia Helmcke & Christian Calvillo Muñoz
Contact: [email protected] & [email protected]

In what way does the concept of “corridor” reconfigure landscapes and livelihoods as host to energy infrastructure? Taking inspiration from Andrew Barry’s (2013) insight that “mapping the corridor of impact” provides solutions to biopolitical questions of which communities count as affected, this panel invites papers to address the abstractions, authorities, and materialities of corridors where energy makes or is expected to make an impact.  Energy corridors take various forms not limited to trunk pipelines, transmission lines, shipping lanes, and undersea infrastructure. They index pathways that open possibilities for traversing the gaps between the “here and there,” the production hinterland and consuming metropolis, thus creating conditions of spatial compression. They call attention to environmental flow and its governance through digital means (drones, remote sensing) and other configurations that conjoin assemblies of material entities with agents engaged in valuation practice. By uniting separated landscapes, the corridor transforms the old dichotomy of nature-culture by organizing the world and its resources through projected symmetries thereby working to erase the frictions encountered in making things flow. This panel asks, what requirements enable the corridor as conditions of impact? How is the energy corridor arranged intellectually,  imagined pragmatically, and implemented socially? This panel welcomes papers that ethnographically engage with the corridor concept with respect to energy infrastructures, ethics, and transition.

Panel Convenors: Arthur Mason & Caura Wood
Contact:   [email protected] &  [email protected]

In this panel, we invite papers that explore the planning, development, implementation, and dismantling of infrastructures related to wider projects of decarbonisation, often framed under the banner of ‘net zero’. Many countries and cities around the world have made ambitious commitments towards decarbonisation with net-zero targets inscribed in laws, strategies, and policies (with some aiming for as soon as 2030). While some governments, local authorities, and organisations celebrate decarbonisation as the basis for local and national economic renewal, others worry about the costs that decarbonisation projects will entail. Many are working to find novel financing models for net zero infrastructure projects by developing new avenues of capital investment, alternative conceptualisations of social value, or a reconsideration of existing energy policies that maintain the status-quo. These approaches make claims not only about carbon emissions reductions but also about issues such as local community needs, ownership and control, distributions of resources and benefits, and forms of decision-making. Meanwhile, backlash against net zero projects also frequently hinges on moral economic questions about who becomes asked to bear what costs, and with what implications.

We will explore net zero infrastructure projects as sites of deliberation about moral economies, opening up questions about the economic arrangements that decarbonisation projects demand, and the values, ethics, and questions of fairness that they entail. In paying attention to moral economies of decarbonisation, our panel will contribute to broader debates on infrastructures of energy by tracing how materially grounded economic imaginaries animate and constrain infrastructures and their promises. 

Panel Convenors: Hannah Knox & Itay Noy
Contact: [email protected]

As global energy systems face mounting pressures – from climate change to geopolitical conflict and financial volatility – the concept of risk is taking on new urgency and complexity. On the one hand, we are seeing how extractive and infrastructure projects previously considered too risky to develop are having their viability reassessed, and how geopolitical instability combined with the climate crisis reshape the notion of energy security. We observe how experimental technologies are advancing with less regulatory friction and weaker evidentiary thresholds than previously accepted, justified by the scale of the climate crisis. The risk of inaction pitched against risks associated with specific interventions. On the other hand, risk is no longer merely something to be avoided or mitigated; it is being actively recast as a form of innovation, leadership, and moral imperative. From venture capital funding unproven energy startups to governments subsidizing uncertain infrastructure and extractive bets, new narratives are emerging around what counts as acceptable—or even visionary—risk.

Risk, in this context, is not just something to avoid or manage. It is also being used to justify action: by governments backing strategic industries, by investors funding unproven solutions, and by institutions reframing uncertainty as opportunity. Yet this raises important questions: Who defines what counts as an acceptable risk? Whose interests are protected, and whose are exposed? How do financial markets and public policy adapt to this shifting risk landscape? And how do narratives of risk shape our energy presents, and futures?

Panel Convenors: Emilka Skrzypek & Nick Bainton
Contact: [email protected]

New energy infrastructures are part of increasingly busy, multi-purpose oceanic spaces. Many analysts see both great environmental justice risks in the rush to conquer ‚blue frontiers‘, as well as opportunities for a ‚new blue deal’. The uneven field of ocean energy expansion includes industries such as tidal and thermal energy extraction, deep sea mining of critical minerals for renewable energy production, hydrogen transport and offshore wind farms. The ocean energy field also includes community ambitions such as net zero island living, and alleviating energy poverty in Asia and the Caribbean through marine renewables. All of these projects intersect with established ocean roles in fishing, tourism, major transport routes – and as a habitat in its own right.

Building on the ‚oceanic turn‘ in the humanities, as well as critical perspectives on emerging blue economies, this panel asks how ocean spaces are being reshaped by new energy infrastructures – and how scholarship might actively contribute to wise and careful handling of ocean energy. The panel builds on a differentiated notion of environmental justice that includes e.g. representational, procedural and distributionary as well as restitutive and transgenerational aspects, and does not shy away from critiques of the ‚justice‘ framework itself. We ask:

• How do ocean energy projects invoke a wide variety of affective projections, from major investments, to outspoken resistance to faith in solving the climate and environmental justice issues?
• What is specific about the issues of trust and mistrust, hope and despair, in relation to ocean-based energy infrastructures?
• How do the specificities of ocean-based energy production, circulation and consumption impact established ‚terrestrial‘ energy industries?
• What ocean epistemologies other than the ‚blue economy/frontier‘ are suited to building ‚right relations‘ around energy?
• What opportunities can we grasp to put scholarly analyses and networks in the service of blue energy justice?

Panel Convenors: Ichsan Rahmanto & Jeanne Féaux de la Croix
Contact: [email protected] & [email protected]

Industrial decarbonisation and its energy base represent a critical, yet under-theorised, dimension of the global response to climate change. As heavy industries like cement, steel, fertilisers, fossil fuels, and others, are reimagined as sites of low-carbon innovation, new ethical and political questions arise through the convergence of diverse domains, such as energy systems, labour relations, financial and policy instruments, supply chains and much more.  While the imperative to decarbonise such industries is strong, most projects being pursued rely on technocratic, developmentalist, and capital-intensive logics that reproduce existing inequalities, social and environmental harms. This raises critical questions about what kinds of futures are being imagined into being, for whom, and at what cost.

This panel asks how social scientists can meaningfully engage with the ethical and political stakes of industrial decarbonisation. To do so, we must understand this transformation not as a single, socio-technical challenge, but as a convergence of multiple domains including energy, extraction, infrastructure, labour, finance, carbon governance, environmental policy, and Indigenous struggle, each with its own knowledge systems, histories, and power dynamics. These domains are increasingly drawn together under the umbrella of industrial decarbonisation, creating new assemblages often yet to be named or studied. Critically engaging with these convergences requires dialogue across disciplines and traditional areas of sub-disciplinary expertise. This panel asks how social scientists can meaningfully engage with the ethical stakes of industrial decarbonisation by bringing together scholars and scholarship to theorise the complex convergence of these shifting domains.

Together, we hope to explore questions such as:

• How do the ethical imperatives of decarbonisation take shape within industrial contexts shaped by long histories of extraction, labour and Indigenous struggle, and environmental harm?
• In what ways are new coalitions of expertise shaping the moral and political contours of industrial decarbonisation?
• How are certain industrial futures made desirable or apparently inevitable, and what ethical assumptions underpin these visions of low-carbon industrial development?
• Whose knowledge systems and ethical frameworks are centred or excluded in the governance of industrial transitions?

Panel Convenors: Kari Dahlgren & Timothy Neale
Contact: [email protected]