Paper short abstract

This paper seeks to recast previous elaborate work in the anthropology of divination to provide a glossary adapted to current research into ecosocial (dis)balance and the reading of signs in ‘nature’.

Paper long abstract

Comparing the work of René Devisch on Yaka divination with other equatorial traditions, especially from the Great Lakes, the authors explore the role of divination and dream-interpretation practices in political (infra)structuring. The role is pivotal due to its facilitation of reading the (natural and social) environment (mazingira, Sw.) which chieftaincies are predicated on. No rainmaking without divination, which crafts a horizon of parallel eco-political scenarios. From the Bulima chief's dilapidated yet inhabited palace one can see across the lake the Mbarika shore where his rainmaker sits in a grass house considering the scenarios in light of the chief's capacity (tensor of -kum). Which vocabulary does anthropology require to lay bare the pluralist ontology? This is comparative work, based both on recent data collection and on Devisch’s last unpublished manuscript, which he invited the first author to edit. The authors welcome the audience to co-interpret certain ethnographic fragments.

Paper short abstract

This paper reads Goa’s khazan lands as living hydro-agro-aqua technologies shaped by 4,000 years of community knowledge. Through bunds, canals and sluice gates, khazans manage tides, salinity and floods, supporting rice, fish, salt and diverse food systems.

Paper long abstract

Khazan lands sustain complex agro-ecological systems that integrate food production, habitat creation, and water management. They support salt-tolerant rice, seasonal vegetables, and coconut palms, while providing vital habitats for diadromous fish, prawns, and crabs moving between freshwater and marine environments. Traditional aquaculture practices are closely aligned with lunar rhythms and tidal cycles, enabling communities to regulate water flows, maintain ecological balance, and ensure sustainable yields.

Salt pans within khazans demonstrate adaptive seasonal management. During the monsoon, inundated pans support aquaculture, while in the dry season they facilitate high-quality salt production. Coconut palms planted along bunds stabilise soils, prevent erosion, buffer storms, and provide food, oil, fibre, and culturally significant materials. Together, these practices reveal khazans as multifunctional landscapes where agriculture, aquaculture, and coastal protection coexist.

Beyond production, khazans embody principles of reciprocity and integrated management. Water, soil, plants, animals, and humans are understood as interdependent, governed through collective decision-making and shared responsibility. This ethical relationship foregrounds care, restraint, and long-term stewardship over extractive use.

This paper positions khazans as precursors to contemporary ideas such as sponge cities and resilient food systems. By absorbing, storing, purifying, and slowly releasing water and nutrients, khazans function as living infrastructures that regulate hydrology, sustain biodiversity, and secure nutrition. As hybrid “future-past” technologies, they link indigenous engineering, cultural practice, and ecological knowledge, offering critical lessons for climate-resilient, equitable, and integrated approaches to water and food systems in both rural and urban contexts.

Paper short abstract

This paper focuses on the entanglements of plastic pollution and climate change. I argue that plastics recycling start-ups in Uganda can be seen as experimental sites for imagining alternative futures and governing urban transition in a wider context of anthropocenic crisis.

Paper long abstract

This paper focuses on plastics recycling start-ups in Uganda as experimental sites for imagining alternative futures in a wider context of anthropocenic crisis. More specifically, I suggest that plastics recycling start-ups play an important role in shaping urban governance from below against policies that approach sustainable urban transition as a set of techno-logistical solutions. Plastic pollution relates to climate change in at least three ways. As an oil-derived material, it is part of the cause. As a central feature of what has been called the global waste crisis, it evokes similar anxieties about runaway change, and thirdly, in places with poor waste management, plastics end up in drainage systems and streams, thereby contributing to the severity of climate change-induced flooding. This paper focuses on Gulu city in northern Uganda where climate change mitigation is a key driver behind the current strategy for urban planning. Based on three months of fieldwork in the second half of 2025, I show how this strategy that has materialized through the construction of new infrastructures and establishment of environmental protection zones in the city tend to marginalize already vulnerable groups without addressing the lack of sustainable waste management. In response to these 'performative politics' (Fredricks 2018), self-proclaimed waste entrepreneurs and waste artists create alternative infrastructures of recycling that fuse the idea of a circular economy with social inclusion and emphasize localized innovation and knowledge production.

References:

Fredricks, Rosalind (2018). Garbage Citizenship. Vital infrastructures of Labour in Dakar, Senegal. Durham and London: Duke University Press

Paper short abstract

Based on interviews with Canadian broadcast meteorologists, this paper examines forecasting as infrastructural care and horizon work. It shows how temporal coordination, embodied expertise, and improvisation sustain the viability of public weather communication under climate uncertainty.

Paper long abstract

This study examines broadcast meteorological labour in Canada as a form of infrastructural care and horizon work in a public sphere increasingly shaped by climate uncertainty, risk, and contested authority. Building on anthropological and STS work on temporal infrastructures and time as technique (Star 1999; Bear 2016), anticipation (Adams et al. 2009), and the politics of mediated time (Sharma 2014), it approaches forecasting as the coordination of heterogeneous and often incommensurable temporal regimes. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with broadcast meteorologists from major television and news networks across Canada, I explore how atmospheric processes, bureaucratic protocols, and media production cycles are held together in practice.

I argue that broadcast meteorology functions as a future-oriented, experimental infrastructure concerned with the ongoing viability of public orientation under conditions of runaway change. In this sense, forecasting operates as a form of ‘horizon work’ (Petryna 2022): working at the edges of knowledge to stabilize uncertainty and render volatile futures publicly actionable. These practices rely on embodied expertise (Collins and Evans 2007) and on continual work of synchronization, anticipation, and improvisation. Rather than treating these as purely technical responses to uncertainty, this study shows how forecasting operates as a form of situated mediation and care. Read through Boyer’s (2022) notion of revolutionary infrastructures, broadcast meteorology appears as a site where the limits and viability of existing infrastructures are continuously tested, repaired, and provisionally sustained by holding together temporal worlds that might otherwise pull apart.

Paper short abstract

Drawing on research with UK community energy practitioners, this paper explores what we can learn about infrastructuring a climate-change world through attention to everyday practices of energy commoning, showing how they enact a feminist politics of care as a radical approach to decarbonisation.

Paper long abstract

Over the past decades, community energy has emerged as a response to the climate crisis, taking the form of decentralised renewable energy projects that are owned and controlled by, and directly benefit, local communities. Community energy projects often articulate their intervention by conceptualising energy and community through the language of 'the commons'. Drawing on research with community energy practitioners in the UK, this paper explores what we can learn about infrastructuring a climate-change world through attention to these everyday practices of commoning. We show how commoning is enacted not only as a principle of economic redistribution but operationalises a broader feminist politics of care that offers a radical alternative to state- and market-led approaches to decarbonisation. Commoning here exceeds a focus on who owns infrastructure, encompassing instead a broader set of concerns about forms of social organisation, interpersonal relations, and questions of responsibility and agency.

We also consider frictions that arise in the process of energy commoning, and how it takes places in confrontation with socio-material, regulatory, and access constraints that affect how renewable energy can be shared and utilised. These frictions, and the ways in which projects seek to navigate them, illuminate energy commoning and its politics as an ongoing, negotiated practice that attends not only to energy flows but also, crucially, to the social and ethical relationships of care involved in sustaining everyday collective life. This offers important insights into the possibilities and struggles of those seeking to generate revolutionary infrastructures in the face of ecological breakdown.

Paper short abstract

This paper examines how community-led grassroots green infrastructures in the Netherlands, Japan, and Louisiana reshape climate adaptation, governance, and everyday life through locally attuned, experimental practices that challenge top-down solutions and foster alternative climate futures.

Paper long abstract

Our paper explores how community-based climate adaptation infrastructures reconfigure socio-political relations, environmental governance, and everyday life across three contrasting contexts: the Netherlands, Tokyo, Japan, and Louisiana, USA. Drawing from preliminary ethnographic research within the ERC-funded project Climate Citizenship, we examine how ordinary people materially and symbolically infrastructure climate change through green adaptation efforts such as oyster reef restoration, rain gardens, rice paddy dams, and urban farming. We understand community-driven green infrastructuring as a metabolic and relational process—one that operates in both tension and cooperation with established power relations and top-down solutions. Rather than approaching climate change adaptation as a technocratic fix, we analyze how community-driven projects emerge from everyday practices of care, multispecies collaboration, attunement and resilience, particularly in settings shaped by historical inequality and environmental injustice. For example, in Louisiana, climate change adaptation efforts are deeply entangled with racialized infrastructural legacies. In Japan, declining public investment is prompting a shift toward ecological solutions that address interconnected social and environmental challenges. Traditional landscapes, such as stone gardens and paddy fields, are being resignified as green infrastructure. In the Netherlands, a nation long governed by state-led water management, community-driven green infrastructures are provoking debates about civic responsibility and environmental governance. Across these contexts, we illuminate how adaptation is being reimagined through situated, collective efforts to create viable and just futures amid escalating ecological change. Rather than portraying community-driven climate adaptation as revolutionary, we examine how green infrastructure draws on local histories, traditions, and knowledge to reshape it.