Workshop: Infrastructures In, Of, and For the Anthropocene

Program, Abstracts, Participants

Thanks to everyon who participated in this memorable workshop! Read the full program (pdf 2.5 MB) with abstracts.

Workshop description

Interest in infrastructure amongst social scientists and humanities scholars engaging with the Anthropocene continues to proliferate. This work understands infrastructure not simply as neutral matter underpinning social life and produced through human actions, but as political, processual, and more-than-human. A “wider ontology” (Barua 2021) of infrastructure encompasses, amongst others, digital, data and knowledge infrastructures (Karasti et al. 2016), infrastructural renderings of nature (Barua 2021; Wakefield & Braun 2019; Welden 2023), and even how the planet itself engages in
“infrastructuring” processes (Szerszynski 2022).

For scholars in Anthropocene History, infrastructures offer a compelling analytic for approaching the ideas, politics, economic systems, and science and technologies involved in bringing about the Earth system changes currently underway. Yet as ever more things and processes are collated under the umbrella of infrastructure, we might also ask whether the term remains useful for critical scholarship on the Anthropocene. Wagering that it does, we seek to use this workshop to reflect on recent scholarship exploring intersections between infrastructure and Anthropocene, share ongoing work, and collaboratively advance a research agenda. We wish particularly to focus on three main themes:

i) Infrastructures in the Anthropocene, referencing the changes wrought by the Anthropocene to existing infrastructures and understandings and imaginaries of infrastructure. Infrastructures often promise modernity and development, but their promise lies also in what is revealed when they fail or break down and when we interrogate who/what their desired functioning serves (Anand et al. 2018).

ii) Infrastructures of the Anthropocene, meaning those that have contributed to creating the
conditions of the Anthropocene, such as fossil fuel/energy infrastructures, transportation, mining and industrial infrastructures. Here, we are also interested in infrastructures developed to know the Anthropocene, for instance global expert organisations, global earth observation networks, etc.

iii) Infrastructures for the Anthropocene, referring to new infrastructures inaugurated to manage the unruly conditions of the Anthropocene. These include, for example, living infrastructures (forests, peat bogs, phytoplankton, ‘green cattle’, and other ‘nature-based solutions’) as well as proposals for carbon dioxide removal and geoengineering, infrastructures of adaptation and of “resilience, ruins and survival” (Wakefield 2018).

We look forward to welcoming you to Stockholm to discuss these themes together. We expect workshop participants to present for approx. 20 minutes and aim to schedule significant time for questions and discussion.

We ask participants to submit a title and abstract (ca 200-300 words) by 29th August 2025.

There will be limited availability for non-presenting ‘discussants’ who wish to participate in the workshop, and funding is available to cover travel and accommodation in Stockholm, prioritising early career scholars and/or those without project funding. Please contact us to discuss your requirements.

Contacts
Oscar Hartman Davies (postdoc), oscarhd@kth.se
Lakin Anderson (research coordinator), lakin@kth.se