Climate Infrastructures II: Knowledge Infrastructures

Abstract

From large scale schemes promising to limit the impact of future climate disasters, to systems designed for forecasting and predicting future catastrophes; from “green” financial architectures, to geoengineering projects to “remake” climate altogether, this panel seeks to catalyze engagements with infrastructural responses to climate change. Such “climate infrastructures” have become crucial references for various actors including policy makers, urban planners, architects, and civil engineers. And while climate responses—and accompanying epistemic, social, and geopolitical questions across scales—have interested STS scholars, sustained attention to the infrastructural dynamics that undergird them is yet to crystallize in the field. This panel, therefore, seeks to critically examine the epistemic, social, and material infrastructures through which responses to climate change are imagined, understood, and enacted.

Rather than being a pre-defined category, however, we begin by asking: what are climate infrastructures? How are they constituted in everyday practices, using what resources, and by whom? What is the labor of establishing, maintaining, and caring for them? As STS scholarship has demonstrated, infrastructures powerfully shape our capacities to live together, encoding possibilities for—and barriers to—thought and action in ways both obvious and subtle. This then foregrounds attention to how particular infrastructural imaginaries and configurations shape climate action and distribute its burdens and benefits. Attending to climate infrastructures, we believe, opens up new ground for social science engagements with and responses to the ongoing climate emergency.

We invite submissions (in English, Portuguese, or Spanish) addressing conceptual, empirical, and methodological questions about climate infrastructures in varying social and geographic locations.

Individual Presentations

• Building Sustainable Transitions as a place-less global knowledge: Socio-epistemic Imaginaries of a Climate Field - Govind Gopakumar, Concordia University

• Infrastructuring the Future: IIASA and the Making of Climate Scenarios since the 1970s - Béatrice Cointe, CNRS

• Living in Yaounde, resilience to rain and heat. Sensing climate change "from below". - Maïa Ghattas, Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne; Marie Morelle, Université Lyon 2

Chair

• Maka Suarez, University of Oslo / Kaleidos - Center for Interdisciplinary Ethnography

Session Organizers

• Aalok Khandekar, Indian Institute of Technology Hyderabad

• Alison Kenner, Drexel University

• Jamie Cross, University of Edinburgh

• Sulfikar Amir, Nanyang Technological University

• Gökçe Günel, Rice University