Short Abstract

This panel explores revolutionary infrastructures as experimental sites of care and viability in a climate-changed world. We examine how locally attuned projects test and sustain alternative futures beyond techno-fixes and environmental injustice and inequality.

Long Abstract

Each year, climate-related disasters affect a quarter of the world's population, forcing communities to adapt to drastically changing environments, confronting people with their most basic values, needs, and emotions (Faas, 2016). Climate-related disasters manifest in unexpected catastrophes, such as droughts, floods, and hurricanes, as well as slower-developing issues like urban heat islands and air pollution. Climate-related disasters also expose and deepen socio-economic inequalities worldwide, driving mass migration in which people facing discrimination based on gender, age, race, class, caste, indigeneity, and disability bear disproportionate burdens (Islam and Winkel 2017).

Amidst runaway ecological and social change, this panel focuses on experiments in care, viability, and improvised ways of living and imagining futures by thinking with “revolutionary infrastructures.” Boyer (2022) defines these as "experiments in creating new relations and enabling alternative future trajectories to the long, linear timelines of the gray infrastructure status quo”(p. 62). Revolutionary infrastructures are sites where communities collectively experiment with what life can continue, transform, or emerge under changing conditions. Take, for instance, rain gardens, community seed banks, or indigenous fire management practices that act as laboratories of futurity. They enable what Petryna (2022) refers to as “horizon work,” in which possibilities for living with runaway change are continuously improvised and reconfigured at the edges of knowledge. Revolutionary infrastructures empower both people and environments by emphasizing mutual respect and care, helping create alternative future horizons beyond state-led techno-fixes.

We invite papers addressing:

•Projects that stimulate more-than-human/human engagement in climate adaptation (e.g., multispecies relations, ecological partnerships)

•Experimental infrastructures that test and enact new forms of climate viability projects functioning as living laboratories of adaptation and future-making,

•Grassroots and citizen-led climate initiatives that experiment with alternative modes of governance, energy, and care

•Reflections on viable futures, horizon work, and community experimentation as responses to runaway climate change

This Panel has 3 pending paper proposals.
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