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

Energy transformations are not only technological processes but deeply cultural and political ones. Across Europe and beyond, infrastructures of energy transitions—whether fossil-based or renewable—are entangled in emotionally charged narratives of loss, identity, and belonging. This panel investigates how emotional attachments to Heimat, landscape, and place intersect with the rise of right-wing populist framings and broader contestations over climate knowledge and responsibility, highlighting how such emotionalized narratives not only draw on but actively produce notions of Heimat and belonging—which in turn reinforce these attachments. These dynamics are closely linked to the politics of heritage, where claims to cultural continuity, tradition, and identity are mobilized in the context of energy debates.

We are particularly interested in how energy transformations bring forth emotionalized discourses and practices across different fields—and in how they serve as arenas where fundamental questions around responsibility, reason, and truth are negotiated. We explore how energy projects provoke both resistance and mobilization: in former coal regions such as the Rhineland, communities navigate the trauma of forced displacement and loss of landscape. These experiences are shaped by conflicting knowledge regimes—between industrial progress, ecological urgency, and emotional memory—and give rise to complex negotiations around social legitimacy and climate justice. Similarly, in wind energy regions across Baden-Württemberg, renewable energy infrastructures have become focal points of local protest and civic engagement. Here, emotional attachments to landscape aesthetics and local identity often clash with national and global narratives of ecological necessity, revealing tensions in the politics of scale and belonging.

At stake are not only the infrastructures themselves but the ways in which truths and facts are produced, how people are held responsible, and how reason is discursively articulated—often through and with emotion. At the same time, climate leadership initiatives (e.g. Climate Reality Project) attempt to train and mobilize citizens through specific framings of climate action and knowledge, aiming to bridge the gap between scientific expertise and everyday life. These initiatives also highlight how reason, responsibility, and truth are enacted as social practices, and how emotions function not merely as reactions but as structuring forces within climate discourse.

This panel invites contributions that critically examine these issues and explicitly encourages examples with a global perspective, drawing on empirically grounded, ethnographic research across fields and contexts:

• How emotional narratives of Heimat and loss shape responses to energy transition projects;
• The role of right-wing populist discourse in framing energy transitions as threats to their version of cultural identity;
• How local actors produce, negotiate, and contest climate knowledge within programs and protest movements;
• Symbolic, aesthetic, and narrative strategies that legitimize or resist energy transformations;
• How emotionalized narratives co-produce concepts like Heimat, landscape, or cultural identity, reinforcing the attachments they create;
• How responsibility, reason, and truth are constituted and challenged in emotionalized energy debates.

Panel Convenors: Karin Bürkert & Valeska Flor
Contact: [email protected] & [email protected]

Energy transition from fossil fuels is necessary to address climate change, but it is not guaranteed to be sustainable or just. This short panel will examine transitions to renewable energy systems through cultural heritage and imaginaries in two island contexts: Shetland, UK and Newfoundland, Canada. In both areas, fossil fuel developments have had an outsized impact on local cultures (including material and visual cultures and workplace culture) and society; oil infrastructures have also materially reshaped terrestrial and offshore landscapes. As the United Kingdom and Canada seek to develop low-carbon and renewable energy sectors–including wind and green hydrogen–these petroleum-informed cultural norms are coming into tension with technological, socio-economic, and infrastructural elements of this energy transition.

Energy grids do not only power economies, they also have social and cultural impacts (Barrett and Worden 2014; LeMenager 2014; Wilson et al. 2017). Critical energy studies scholarship highlights how energy transitions have cascading effects on politics, social and national identities, labour, art and media, and social movements (Malm 2016; Vemuri and Barney 2022; Jekanowski 2022). Informed by infrastructure studies, the energy humanities, and just transitions scholarship, the presenters in this panel will present preliminary findings from field research undertaken in Shetland and Newfoundland. This is part of a larger research project which the co-convenors are developing between the University of Southampton and Memorial University. Our panel will explore the following research questions:

• What roles do identity and cultural heritage play in imagining and constructing renewable energy infrastructures? How do previous energy infrastructures become part of cultural heritage?
• How is space re-organised by these infrastructures and how does that impact local communities and heritage?
• What are the relationships between energy, enterprise, culture, and identity in island contexts and how does the emergence of new energy paradigms change or entrench these?

Panel Convenors: Rachel Jekanowski & Giulia Champion
Contact: [email protected] & [email protected]

Critical energy infrastructure relies on long planning horizons to account for changing energy demand, security concerns, and long-term sustainability.  As such, foresight is required to anticipate emerging threats, manage uncertainty, and steer towards more sustainable futures (Önnered & Bravic, 2024; Sgouridis et al., 2022). However, much of energy system modelling is based on a system as we know it, not accounting for changes in behavioural characteristics nor deeper discontinuities (Kaviani et al., 2023; Heinonen et al., 2017). Concurrently, energy systems around the world stand before unprecedented developments calling for the build out of infrastructure to accommodate wide-scale electrification and enable growing access to clean energy. This spurs vast investments and reinvestments into the infrastructures of energy which will leave their mark long into the future. Not only does the infrastructure of energy bring environmental impacts, but also significant considerations and debates around ethics and justice in their development, maintenance, and decommissioning (O’Sullivan, Golubchikov, & Mehmood, 2020; Standal et al., 2023; Ram et al., 2022).

Hui writes that “power in the twenty-first century lies not in the parliament but in infrastructure” (2020). In this sense, infrastructures may become capable of opening up new ethical and political horizons, integrating new values and commitments, or by contrast they may adhere to the business-as-usual mode of development. Infrastructure in this sense must be understood not only materially, but also as related to ethical, epistemological, political, axiological values and assumptions. In light of this, we call for empirical and conceptual contributions on alternative energy futures and how they may be imagined and achieved using forward-looking methods, with a particular focus on the ethics and justice of such transformations across global-local societies and intergenerational timeframes. Join us for this panel session in this rising field of interdisciplinary studies of energy futures & foresight (Kristóf, 2024).

The panel will discuss and call for papers such as: 

• Energy degrowth and the ethics of sufficiency.
• Alternative infrastructures of energy – from microgrids to supergrids.
• Self-sufficiency and energy communities in a (g)local energy system. 
• Indirect consumption through our built infrastructure – the consumption that ‘we’ cannot control over.
• Circularity of the flow of energy.
• Future energy systems in techno-utopias/dystopias
• Socio-cultural-political-technical-environmental scenarios of long-term energy futures
• Emerging threats and opportunities in future energy systems
• The future of petrostates and the energies of developing countries. 
• Decoupling fossil fuels’ grasp from renewables by re-imagining the electricity market or global the financial system.

Panel Convenors: Simon Önnered & Erin Rizzato Devlin
Contact: [email protected] & [email protected]

On a cold day in January 2025 the UK saw a £12 million spike in electricity prices passed through to overburdened ratepayers. Reportedly, traders for key natural gas plants gamed the electricity market, threatening to shut down hours before an expected peak in demand as wind power declined, while posting offers on a separate market (that balances supply and demand) to stay open in return for eye-watering profits  – e.g. 50 times market prices, which regulators accepted to avoid outages (Ambrose 2025). A Bloomberg investigation found such practices, often technically legal, proliferated in 2021 and 2022 during high price periods (Finch et al. 2023). Allegations and regulatory actions on price manipulation come from several EU states and the United States, but trading abuses continue.   

Despite record build-outs of renewables, such profiteering endangers plans to phase out fossil fuels to mitigate climate risks and contributes to new energy poverty. These cases highlight the urgency of greater public accountability for energy services, a tall order after two decades of privatizing energy assets and redefining regulation to prioritize corporate participants, while leaving prices to under-regulated futures markets (Ozden-Schilling 2021, Isser 2019).        

Such “standard” reforms of public systems were mandated for indebted countries as part of IMF conditionality, along with controversial cuts to state energy subsidies and shifts to market pricing (Bouzarovski 2007, Dolan-Evans 2021). Rationales included promises of higher efficiency, lower rates, higher reliability and sustainability (as natural gas and renewables replaced coal). Ironically, nationalization of gas plants is a proposal being taken seriously as a possible solution to recent high prices (Khan et al. 2025).  

Other reported problems with market-based energy include fire sales of public assets, questionable efficiency claims, technically complex reports that hinder public input, rising rates, retention of market power by dominant players, market-clearing designs favoring gas which keep electricity prices high, and states losing out to markets in decisions on affordability and energy security.

Many scholars are challenged by a “politics of resignation” to corporate power (Benson and Kirsch 2010) and dominant paradigms within disciplines that see marketization and privatization as inevitable (Kalb 2020).  But social science critiques of market-based energy are essential to bring public voices into regulatory debates and rethink existing models in terms of value and justice.  Moreover, this is imperative at a time when contemporary liberal states are experiencing crises of legitimacy, democracy, indebtedness and climate chaos.

This panel invites papers that consider such questions as:

• How have market reforms to energy infrastructures affected affordability over the short and long terms?
• What are their consequences for energy poverty/justice?
• How are they related to energy crises or risks of climate change?
• How are their effects experienced by different classes, races, genders, and nationalities?
• What externalities exist? Are there adverse effects on public health, ambient ecosystems, or social life?   
• What regulatory approaches work? What alternatives like re-nationalization or community energy commons (e.g. through renewables) are politically possible and economically viable?
• Could marketized systems be challenged by regional degrowth strategies?

Panel Convenors: Sandy Smith-Nonini & Don Nonini
Contact: [email protected] & [email protected]

This panel investigates how extractivist museums—institutions grounded in the material and cultural legacies of mining, oil, gas, and other resource-based industries—navigate their complex role as stewards of industrial heritage while engaging with contemporary demands for environmental accountability and participation in energy transition discourse. As energy systems undergo rapid transformation in response to climate change, public investment, and policy shifts, these museums face critical questions about their ethical responsibilities, narrative authority, and role in shaping collective imaginaries of energy futures. In recent years, debates around energy transitions have intensified, and the rise of renewables has brought new ethical and political dilemmas linked to extraction, capital flows, and colonial legacies. Simultaneously, social scientists, artists, and museum professionals are increasingly implicated in large-scale infrastructure projects, public engagement efforts, and critiques of techno-solutionism. Museums, as visible cultural institutions, thus sit at a critical nexus where energy’s histories, presents, and futures converge.

Papers will explore topics including:

● Narratives of extraction and identity: How have museums historically framed extractivist industries as part of national or regional identity, and how are these narratives evolving amid climate anxiety and political contestation?

● Museums as discursive infrastructures: In what ways do museums serve as platforms—or battlegrounds—for energy transition storytelling and debate?

● Ethics of heritage and preservation: How do institutions reconcile the valorisation of industrial heritage with its environmental and social costs?

● Educational and affective strategies: How are museums using interpretation, design, and pedagogy to communicate complex energy histories and ethics?

● Politics of representation: Who is included or excluded in exhibitions of extractive pasts and energy futures? How are race, gender, class, and Indigenous knowledge addressed or silenced?

● Global and local entanglements: How do geopolitical and regional contexts shape museum narratives of extraction and transition?

This panel makes a timely contribution to the Energy Ethics 2026 agenda by examining museums not only as sites of memory and learning but as active participants in energy infrastructures—material, symbolic, and affective. It speaks directly to conference themes including expertise, ethics, representation, public engagement, and the entanglement of humans and nonhumans in infrastructures of energy. By foregrounding the role of cultural institutions in mediating extractive legacies and imagining post-carbon futures, this panel opens new interdisciplinary conversations about energy, justice, and responsibility in the Anthropocene.

Panel Convenors: Anya Kuteleva &  Andrei Rogatchevski
Contact: [email protected] & [email protected]

Traditionally, infrastructure is understood as physical systems—roads, bridges, water pipes, and similar networks (Kanoi et al. 2022). Yet such a view tends to obscure the complex and often ambiguous processes through which infrastructures come into being, persist, or decay. While much social science research focuses on the historical emergence of large-scale energy systems, less attention has been paid to how they change over time and into the future.

Even when stalled or abandoned, infrastructures shape people’s anticipations, expectations, and memories (e.g., Fathoni 2025; Yarrow, 2017), blurring the line between presence and absence, function and failure. The coordination of technological systems and organizational structures—spanning human and non-human actors—often unfolds through disjointed or opaque processes (Lammer and Thiemann 2023). Once established, infrastructures tend to recede into the background, rendering invisible not only the affective labor that sustains them but also the legal, political, and regulatory arrangements that make them possible (Star and Ruhleder 1996; Star 1999).

In this session, we are interested in exploring how these ambiguous and uncertain characters surrounding energy infrastructure are governed across different scales, in a way that tends to defy the rigid binary between local and global (e.g., McFarlane, 2025). Infrastructures are not merely technical artifacts; they are deeply entangled with regulatory, economic, cultural, and organizational elements (Turner 2016). We respond to the burgeoning scholarly discussions that examine how such affective and ambivalent dynamics around infrastructure-making processes play a role in the day-to-day formation of subjectivities, and what this means for enacting infrastructural politics (e.g., Lesutis and Kaika, 2024; Knox, 2017; Lesutis, 2024). We also intend to take this conversation further by exploring the ethical and moral dilemmas arising from this interscalar attempt to govern ambiguities surrounding energy infrastructure.

 This panel invites contributions from a wide range of perspectives. For instance, we are keen to explore how the opacities, loopholes, or inconsistencies underpinning the legal and regulatory framework shape how infrastructures are built, maintained, or left to decay. This also raises further questions about the governmental dynamics emerging in state-making processes if we take energy infrastructures’ ambiguous and affective qualities more seriously. We are also open to exploring how people across different scales navigate these ambiguities, and the kind of ethical and moral claims that they raise in response, and what this means for the emergence of alternative forms of infrastructure governance (e.g. community energy) and the possibilities for including those voices who have been marginalised in infrastructure-making process. Thus, this panel encourages multidisciplinary contributions from law, management studies, international relations, political economy, sociology, human geography, and anthropology, to examine empirical themes that include, but are not limited to:

• Implications of market intervention and subsidy allocation;
• State-corporate entanglements and resource nationalism;
• Access of small-scale and marginalised actors to energy decision-making;
• Legal grey zones and procedural injustice in energy policy-making;
• How communities experience energy infrastructure from below;
• “Sacrifice zones” in renewable energy projects;
• Greenwashing in critical mineral supply chains;
• Stakeholder conflicts in mining ESG reporting;
• Indigenous people’s quest for energy sovereignty.

Panel Convenors: Magdalena Dąbkowska & Hilman S. Fathoni
Contact: [email protected] & [email protected]

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]

Carbon offsetting has become one of the few mechanisms through which climate finance reaches communities in the Global South. This flow of funding is sustained by positive narratives: claims of emissions avoided, environmental co-benefits delivered and lives improved. In this politically charged space, critical research becomes both necessary and dangerous. When findings expose failures, exaggerated impacts, or disempowered participation, they may lead to project cancellations, threatening the limited finance reaching marginalized communities.

This panel invites contributions that examine the ethical, political, and strategic tensions facing researchers working on carbon markets, climate finance, and just transitions. what does it mean to “do no harm” in a space where climate change poses a direct threat to people’s livelihoods, and interventions funded on flawed logic can offer very real relief? Who should decide what counts as “worth the cost” when the people most affected are often disaggregated, disempowered, and excluded from global conversations? Should we challenge the existence of carbon markets, or work to reform them?

Importantly, we confront the broader political context: in an era of rising backlash against climate action, critical research can be twisted to justify dismantling funding altogether, rather than reforming and redirecting it toward more effective, just, and locally accountable policies. Can critical research unintentionally do more harm than good? What does it take to carve out a space for research that is both honest and constructive, and is critical without being fatal to the very idea of climate solidarity?

We especially welcome contributions that grapple with:

• Ethical dilemmas in fieldwork and data reporting when findings can do harm
• Participatory, decolonial, or justice-oriented research approaches
• Case studies where research has led to unintended political or material consequences
• The role of researchers in shaping — or resisting — the legitimacy of carbon offset systems
• Strategies for engaging with policymakers and funders

Panel Convenors: Natalie Boyd-Williams, Tash Perros & Jen Cronin
Contact: [email protected]

Since the 1992 Earth Summit, a broad international consensus has coalesced around the urgent need of mitigating climate change by reducing anthropogenic greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, primarily carbon dioxide (CO₂). Despite decades of decarbonization efforts, however, atmospheric GHG concentrations continue to rise. Meanwhile, practices of ‘green extractivism’ reify the maxim that ‘everything must change so that everything can stay the same’. Beyond economic imperatives and geopolitical dynamics, this panel explores a deeper explanatory layer: the technoscientific, onto-epistemological paradigms embedded in the science, policy, and public discourse on decarbonization.

Both fossil-based and green extractivist logics indeed rely on reductionist, materialist ontologies that disregard socioecological complexity and interdependence, offering simple and comparable decarbonization metrics––like CO₂-equivalents––that risk distorting reality and fostering an illusion of certainty that can be more harmful than uncertainty itself. One example is the application of cap-and-trade systems originally designed for pollutants with specific, identifiable sources and clear technical pathways for abatement, to CO₂, a gas with diverse, diffuse sources that is also integral to life on Earth. Another is justifying the cutting down of old-growth forests for bioenergy and materials with replanting, under the assumption that sheer numerical equivalence is all that matters. Conversely, “systemist” approaches attempt to account for complexity yet presuppose already assembled systems that can be managed or optimised, ignoring the messy, ongoing work of negotiating values, needs, and relations among diverse human and non-human actors.

Caught between overly narrow and overly abstract framings, even ethically driven efforts can yield perverse outcomes or the mere appearance of progress. This panel invites critical contributions that challenge both reductionist and systemist paradigms and explore how technoscience not only describes but actively participates in composing the world. We welcome empirical and theoretical work—primarily but not exclusively from anthropology, science and technology studies, and human geography—that examines how decarbonization is defined, performed, negotiated, institutionalised, and contested in theory and in practice.

Panel Convenors: Andrea Cavina & Lara Mezzapelle
Contact: [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

Visual methods are increasingly utilized in energy research, offering a powerful means to uncover and analyse phenomena that are not well understood through traditional research methods. However, the method is rarely applied in large scale energy research multi or interdisciplinary projects. Whilst there is an established tradition of drawing upon visual and narrative research methods in diverse empirical settings including more recently in energy, they have mostly been employed in small scale qualitative studies, whereby representativeness and validity may not drive the research design. Inspired by a novel method termed ethno-visual survey developed by researchers in an EPSRC-funded project GLOW (EP/V041770/1), we invite contributions that seek to examine new methodological ground visual research methods may bring about in context of large scale inter or multidisciplinary energy research. The GLOW multidisciplinary project investigated how social identities, everyday practices, and temporal routines shape collective energy dynamics in two urban UK contexts: Bristol and Glasgow. Our study employed an ethno-visual online survey of over 500 residents and analysed participant-submitted photographs using visual analysis techniques adapted from Lyon (2016)

The panel session invites a range of methodological contributions that seek to investigate use of visual methods in large scale inter or multidisciplinary energy research – this may include empirical case studies, conceptual exploratory insights, position essays or review papers. This session will provide an in-depth exploration of a range of methodological approaches, the analysis processes involved, and how the use of visual research brought about new insights for large scale energy studies.

Panel Convenors: Sonja Oliveira & Anna Chatzimichali
Contact: [email protected]